


A Nonlinear, Nonsubjective Viewpoint

by digitalpen



Series: Nobody Knows How He Does It [1]
Category: Doctor Who (2005), Homestuck
Genre: AU where Bro doesn't suck, Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Alternia, American Revolution, Canon-Typical Violence, Crossover, Cybermen - Freeform, Gen, Medieval Tournament, Revolution, Space Flight, Swords, Time Travel, Waffle House, Whostuck, helmsmen - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-21
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2020-12-27 07:34:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 32,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21115079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/digitalpen/pseuds/digitalpen
Summary: You'd think that for two time travelers with all of existence before them, they wouldn't run into each other so often.  Fortunately, the Doctor doesn't care much what other people think, and he meets up with Dave Strider anyway.  It should be impossible for a human kid from Houston to just hop through time and space, but the universe is in dire need of coolkids, and Dave is happy to meet those needs.(Or: A Homestuck/Doctor Who Crossover?  In 2019?  It's more likely than you think.)





	1. Rose: Many Meetings with the Knight of Time

**Author's Note:**

> In this crossover, SBURB/SGRUB never happened, and the beta kids got to grow up a little more normally. Not entirely normally, though, because it wouldn’t be as interesting otherwise, and then they might not fit into the world of Doctor Who so well. Dave’s life in particular has changed, since he didn’t have to grow up with a Bro possessed by the spirit of Cal in a creepy puppet. Instead, he got a high-strung but well-meaning grown up version of Dirk who was willing to put up with a kid who could time travel. It’s not perfect, but they’ll make do. Oh, and also the Doctor is out there somewhere.

In a stunning example of temporal improbability, the first time that the Doctor met Dave Strider was also the first time that Dave met the Doctor. 

Rose and the Doctor were walking along the quays of the Boston harbor at sunset, in the winter of 1773. The Doctor had traded out his jacket for a more period-appropriate sailor's coat, and he told her that there was "a lovely tea party" scheduled for that evening. Rose had been through enough by now that she was not expecting to sit down for biscuits and cake, but she was still a bit out of the loop. Was this something to do with history? Or was some cohort of aliens skulking around, ready to cause trouble?

When Rose saw the boy, who was sitting, relaxed, on a barrel, kicking his feet back and forth, her mind did not immediately register that he was out of place. Then her reason caught up with her, and she stopped short to perform a comical double-take. The boy was wearing a hoodie and jeans, and a pair of beetle-black aviator sunglasses. He was holding what looked like a camera on his lap, a nice one with a telescoping lens. And it was 1773.

The Doctor had stopped with her, and Rose turned to see him staring at the boy. The young man himself was turned back toward the pair of them. He might have been staring back, but behind his sunglasses, it was impossible to tell.

The Doctor whistled appreciatively and pulled out a piece of rickety scanning equipment.

"Look at this, Rose," he said. "This young man is temporally displaced by more than two hundred years!"

"Yeah, I can see that," she said. "What's he doing here in 1773?"

"No idea. It could be an accident, you know. That can happen sometimes--a teeny hole in time can open up spontaneously, and then people just stumble through." The Doctor nodded. He had that look on his face that said he was working through a puzzle.

"If it's an accident and he's stuck, you think we should offer him a ride?"

"I think that that's an excellent first step," said the Doctor, who was already walking confidently over to the boy on the barrel. He came up close, looked to the boy, and crossed his arms to lean on a crate across from him. Rose followed and took up a post beside the Doctor.

"Evening," the Doctor said, brightly.

The kid only nodded. His mouth was a flat line, and he fiddled with the camera, thoughtfully.

"What's a nice lad like you doing in a place like this, huh? Are you lost?" the Doctor asked.

The kid shook his head slightly, but his expression did not change. "Nah, I'm waiting."

"Oh! Waiting for the tea party?" The kid nodded. "You're American, then?" the Doctor asked.

The kid nodded again. His lip quirked up, then flattened again. "As apple pie." 

"How'd you get here, then?" Rose asked. "There's no United States yet."

"I walked," the boy said, simply. 

"What, through time?" she said.

"Yup. How'd you guys get here?" He seemed supremely unaffected by the idea of taking a walk and ending up in a different year.

Rose looked at the Doctor, who was still trying to figure the boy out. "We've got a time machine," she said.

The kid raised a single eyebrow. "Time machine?" he said. "Cool."

The Doctor cut in again, brows furrowed. "So, you say you just hopped right through time, no machine or nothing?" The kid nodded. "And it wasn't an accident? You did it on purpose?" He nodded again. The Doctor's eyes sparked with interest. "Can you show me?" he said.

The boy hopped down off the barrel and stood there, brushing off his jeans. He handed his camera out to Rose, who took it gingerly. "Careful with that," the young man said. "It was a gift. See you in a minute." Then he took a step forward, walking purposefully between tall stacks of packaged merchandise. In the half beat between his first step and the next, the boy vanished completely into the cold air of the harbor.

The Doctor grinned and pulled out a couple of banged-up instruments in quick succession. Rose moved the camera to one hand and used the other hand to retrieve her watch. She kept track of the seconds and watched the spot where the boy had disappeared.

The watch ticked on, and the Doctor hummed about in curiosity, and, exactly one minute after he left, the boy reappeared right in front of them, with nothing but a faint distortion, like heat rippling through the air. He completed his unfinished step, took another, then turned smartly around to face Rose and the Doctor.

"Oh, that was brilliant!" said the Doctor. The kid smirked and bowed elaborately to his small audience. Then he held a hand out to Rose for the camera. She gave it back to him.

"I hope that means that I get to see your dope-ass time machine later," the kid said. "It's only fair, you know?"

“Of course!” said the Doctor, who was rather caught up in the thrill of discovery. “We can show you right after the tea party ends, since it’s going to start soon. And we can exchange information, too. I’ve never seen a human travel through time unassisted before.”

“I’ve never met another time traveler before,” said the kid. “It’s all good. We could have a little club, with a secret handshake and fancy tattoos and everything. Gotta use the secret knock to get into the clubhouse, only the secret knock is ‘Shave and a Haircut’ because that’s tight as hell.” The tone of his voice did not change at all, but the cadence and tempo of it picked up slightly, suggesting that the boy was more excited than his straight face let on.

The Doctor chuckled. Rose was struck with the impulse to ruffle the boy’s white-blonde hair, but she held back, figuring he wouldn’t appreciate it very much.

“What’s your name, then?” she said. “I’m Rose Tyler, and he’s the Doctor.”

“Rose, huh,” said the kid. “I’m Dave. Strider.”

"It's nice to meet you, Dave," said the Doctor. He convinced Dave to share his screenname for some chat service that, according to Dave, had a function for leaving memos that transcended the normal bounds of time.

At about that time, several rowdy men raced by and joined up with others in rather scandalous Indian costumes, and the tea party began in earnest. Rose, Dave, and the Doctor watched as crate after crate was dumped straight into the water of the harbor. Dave used his camera to take several pictures, lamenting the poor light over the scene.

They got back to the TARDIS, and the Doctor said, "Now I'm sure you know what you're doing, Dave, but it would be a very bad idea to just spread those photos around when you get home. All sorts of nasty people might come after you if they knew what you could do." He gripped the door handle and looked seriously down at Dave.

Dave looked back up at the Doctor, no expression on his face. "I gotcha, Doc," he said. "Bro would kill me if this stuff got out. He's got rules in place, real big on safety."

The Doctor nodded his satisfaction, then he opened the doors of the TARDIS and led Dave inside. Dave was appropriately appreciative during the whole tour. He marveled with his odd poker face to see that it was bigger on the inside, and he nodded in approval at the Doctor's extensive wardrobe. They parted ways afterwards, and Rose and the Doctor watched as young Dave walked briskly into the future.

\---

The next time that Rose and the Doctor ran into Dave Strider was nearly a month after Boston, at least as they experienced it. They were enjoying ancient Rome, where the Doctor was eager to pick up some figs, and Rose was eager to watch strapping young men wrestle for olive wreaths. 

They saw him on the street, dodging quickly out of the way of carts and people, dressed in a toga that Rose was fairly sure had been fashioned from a bedsheet. He was also wearing his aviator glasses, and a pair of bright cherry-red Converse high tops. At least he had made an effort this time.

Rose noted that he was taller than before, broader in the shoulder and less round in the face. Dave was obviously midway through those awkward teenage growth spurts, with extra uncalibrated length in his legs and arms that he hadn't had in Boston. His movements were choppy and self-conscious, but still quick and skillful.

Rose nearly squealed, delighted to see a familiar face. She waved a hand to catch his eye and called out to him, "Dave! Dave, over here!"

Dave looked up, and a half-smile ghosted itself across his lips. He trotted across the street to join them.

“‘Sup,” he said.

“Hello, Dave, lovely to see you again,” said the Doctor. 

“You too, Doc,” said Dave. “Last time I saw you, you looked way different.”

“Did I? That must have been confusing.” Dave shrugged and nodded in greeting to Rose. “Rose and I are just here for the day to check the markets,” the Doctor said. “What are you up to?”

“Gladiator fights,” Dave said. “John made me watch this terrible movie, and I am determined to document every single historical inaccuracy. I am going to destroy him with cold, hard facts.”

“Like a bit of extreme archaeology,” Rose said. “Who’s John?”

“Oh, John’s my best bro,” said Dave. “We’ve been friends since kindergarten, when I pushed him off the pogo ride in the park. He has a thing for dumb movies, and he’s always trying to get the drop on me for his pranks, but I always catch him.”

The Doctor chuckled. “He sounds like a good friend.”

Dave nodded. “One of these days I’m going take him on a trip with me and really blow his mind," he said. "It'll be like _pchoooo_." He mimed a pair of small explosions, originating from his ears.

"Oh, I can't recommend that enough," said the Doctor. "Always more fun to travel with a friend, and show them all your favorite sights."

"Hmm, yes I suppose," said Rose, trying to tease the Doctor.

“Yeah, and I can introduce him to my other friends,” said Dave. “I know these kids on other planets, and this girl who lives on a spaceship, and I have a burning need to inflict the concentrated dorkiness of John Egbert on them. Plus, he’s wanted to meet aliens ever since third grade, like, that kid will not shut up about flying saucers.”

Rose grinned sideways at the Doctor. “You know, the Doctor’s an alien, too. Last of his kind, very rare alien breed.”

“Oh, I knew that already.”

Rose pouted. The Doctor’s face looked scared for a split second. “You did?” he said. Then, “Oh, you did say you had seen me when I looked different.”

Dave shot him finger guns. “Now you’re getting it. I’ve known you for like four years, Doc, it’s no big deal.”

The Doctor looked wide-eyed and coughed into his hand. “Right! Marketplace, let’s get to the marketplace and then the Forum, how does that sound? Dave, you’re welcome to come with.”

Rose tried to ignore the Doctor’s ungraceful attempt to change the subject. But she considered Dave more carefully. At this point in his life, he had known the Doctor for longer than she had. What kind of secrets did he have up in his head?

Dave shrugged and rejected the Doctor’s invitation. “I’d better be going,” he said, but he shook hands with the Doctor and hugged Rose before he left. In seconds, he had woven himself back into the fabric of the crowd on the street.

\---

Rose felt like they had been waiting for hours to start the tournament. She and the Doctor sat on wooden seats, watching the heralds of dozens of noble houses announce their many contenders to the crowd. Rose sighed and rested her chin on one hand. 

She straightened in surprise when a page in gray announced "Sir David Strider's" entrance to the tournament. The knight in question stepped out of one of the tunnels, to parade in a short circuit of the arena.

It was definitely their Dave. He was wearing his sunglasses, but otherwise, he was dressed just like the other knights, in mail and heavy boots. His rounded pauldrons were draped with a dramatic red cape. He was carrying a standard--red, with a black crow speaking--and a shining helm crowned with a plume of black feathers.

He was older than Rose expected, almost certainly older than she was, herself. He had grown taller and more self-assured. It was difficult to tell under his armor, but Rose had a hunch that his shoulders had filled out beautifully.

Dave swaggered around the arena, and stopped near one corner, where he removed his shades and passed them to a woman in a pale lilac dress. His helm went on, then he took the woman's favor and tied it to his belt, opposite to his long broadsword.

The day went on, and Rose and the Doctor watched the tournament with more excitement than the opening ceremonies. Jousting was thrilling, and when they turned a score of knights out onto the field for a frenzied free-for-all, they cheered with the rest of the crowd.

In the late afternoon, they began a bracket for unmounted fighters, and Rose and the Doctor got to see Dave compete. He blew through his first two challengers with skill and grace. Rose noticed that the lady in the purple dress cheered for each of Dave's wins and watched his matches with an analytical eye. As the challenges continued, Dave got better and better, and wielded his sword with such ease that he must have been practicing for years.

Dave's skill carried him all the way to the final match. Spectators cheered and clapped while Dave and a knight in blue traded blows. The blue knight had more support from the crowd, but Dave was not without his own cadre of fans. They went back and forth across the sand, but Dave got sloppy one too many times, and the match was decided in the blue knight's favor. Dave and the blue knight bowed to the noble hosts while shadows lengthened, and the tournament came to an end.

After some closing ceremonies, Rose and the Doctor found their way out to the lawns, where several tables and a bonfire had been set up for feasting. The light was flickering and undependable, but Rose caught sight of Dave filling his plate at a table of pastries. She started over to greet him, but someone tapped her on the shoulder before she could get through the crowd.

Rose turned to see the woman in the purple dress. Her hair was blonde like straw, but far shorter than any of the other noblewomen. She wore it pulled back with a headband made of black velvet.

“Hello again, Rose. It’s lovely to see you here,” said the woman. She had an American accent, but her voice was pitched low and sultry. Her darkly painted lips curled in an enigmatic smile.

Rose was caught off guard. She did not recall ever meeting this blonde woman before, and this was her first time in the Middle Ages anyway. How did this lady know her name?

“Yes, it’s—I’m sorry, who are you?” Rose said.

The lady paused. “Oh, is this perhaps our first meeting? I knew it had to happen eventually.”

“Are you…with Dave? I’m afraid I don’t know who you are, but sometimes time makes fools of us.”

“Yes, I am with Dave.” The lady held her hand out to Rose. “I’m Rose Lalonde, from the twenty-first century.”

Rose took her hand and shook it. “Rose Tyler, and, er, likewise. I travel with the Doctor.” Rose turned her head and indicated the Doctor, who had snuck up on Dave and was now engaging him in conversation.

“Yes, I remember him,” said Rose Lalonde. “I’m glad that I finally got to introduce myself today. In all of the meetings that I remember, you and the Doctor already knew me.”

“Well I’m glad to meet you for the first time. Good to know that I’ll see you again, I suppose.” Rose inched up to the table of pastries, where the boys were waving them over to talk about the tournament. “Oh, and I love your name, by the way,” Rose said.

Rose Lalonde giggled. “I love yours too,” she said. “What are the odds that there are two blonde girls named Rose traveling through time?”

The Doctor inserted himself into their conversation. “Well, I’d say they’re about one hundred percent, right now,” he said. He stuck his hand out to Rose Lalonde and introduced himself. “It’s the Doctor, and you’ve already met Rose. Dave tells me your name is Rose, too!”

“Yes, it’s good to see you again, Doctor.”

“Now Dave, how come you’ve never mentioned your sister before?” said the Doctor. Rose started. She had assumed that Dave and Rose were caught up in a relationship like she had with the Doctor. But if they were siblings instead, then that was much different.

Rose mentally catalogued the family resemblance. It manifested mostly in the pale color of Dave and Rose’s skin and hair, but they also had the same nose. Rose wondered whether they got it from their mother or their father.

“We didn’t grow up together,” said Dave, as he balanced a stack of apple tarts on his plate. He led the party towards a round table in the shadows further from the bonfire, which was currently unoccupied. “We became friends around the same time that I met you two, and then over the years we got closer.”

Rose Lalonde smiled again. She showed no teeth until she spoke. “You have no idea how jarring it is to learn that the weird boy you met on the internet is actually your brother.”

Rose laughed. “No way, that’s crazy,” she said.

“I assure you,” said Rose Lalonde, “that really is how it happened.”

The four of them continued talking long into the night, until the bonfire had burned down to mostly embers. Rose found that she liked Rose Lalonde, who was pretty and witty and had a dark, dry sense of humor. She and Dave spoke like fencers fighting a bout, each dodging nimbly out of the other’s way. They used vocabulary and turns of phrase as a foilist uses parries and counterattacks. They danced skillfully in order to deploy what Rose was sure were insults, but every time one landed, it was shrugged off for the next round.

Once the bonfire was extinguished completely, Dave and his sister said their goodbyes and walked off into the woods to return to their home time. Rose and the Doctor went back to the TARDIS, exhausted from the long day they had had, but satisfied with everything they had seen.

\---

Rose and the Doctor saw Dave only one other time while he was grown up. They were back in the twenty-first century, though they had chosen to spend the night several years after Rose had left on her journey. It had taken much whining, but Rose had convinced the Doctor to use his psychic paper to get them onto the red carpet for a movie premiere in Hollywood.

Rose was ecstatic to be wearing an evening gown straight from her dreams, with skinny straps on top and a boatload of sequins on the bottom. She had to admit that the Doctor also cleaned up nice in classic black tie. The paparazzi took lots of pictures, even though they couldn’t have known who Rose and the Doctor were.

They went inside at the end of the cocktail hour, and the bar was already packing up. Rose wasn’t legal to drink in America anyway. They took seats in the middle, which was good luck. Rose waited for the lights to go down and wondered if there would be previews shown before a Hollywood premiere.

Someone tapped on Rose’s shoulder from behind. There was the sound of a dry cough. Rose turned sideways in her seat to look. In the two seats behind Rose and the Doctor were Dave Strider and Rose Lalonde, also dressed for the red carpet.

Rose Lalonde was wearing a gown in plum so dark it was almost black. Dave had swapped the white shirt of his tuxedo for blood red, which matched his sneakers. Rose ogled them for a moment. The Doctor turned to see them and threw an elbow casually over the back of his chair.

“Rose! Dave! Oh my god, what are you doing here?” said Rose, in a hushed whisper.

“What are we doing here?” said Dave, quietly. “What are you two doing here? I’m trying to support my sister, what’s the deal? Alien invasion? Do you, like, need help?” He looked back at Rose Lalonde, who seemed very perplexed. “Wait, you’ve heard me talk about them before, right? Rose and the Doc? Time traveler’s club?”

Rose Lalonde drew her lips into an elegant and pensive frown. “I’m not sure if I’ve heard the full story, but I might have the gist of it.”

“Okay, well, that’s Rose Tyler, she’s cool, and that’s the Doctor. Leather-jacket Doctor, if we want to be specific. Now why are you here?” Dave directed his last question at the Doctor. “Is it urgent? Do I need my sword? Or did you just want to catch up or something?”

“To be honest,” said the Doctor, “we didn’t even know that you’d be here. We just wanted to catch a movie, and Rose wanted all of the Hollywood glamor, you know.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Dave. “I live here. I go to all of Rose’s movies, since her S.O. isn’t available. Why wouldn’t I be here at this one?”

“Did you say this was Rose’s movie?” said Rose. “I had no idea you were in movies!”

“I’m not in them,” said Rose Lalonde, who nevertheless looked as glamorous as any actress Rose could imagine. “I write books which often end up becoming screenplays. Dave directs.”

“Oh, but we never work together,” Dave said. “Too different. Her stuff is pretentious as shit and my stuff is, well, shit. Maybe I’ll send you something sometime. But did you really not know that this is where I live?”

“No idea,” said the Doctor. “I’ve only seen you on the road.”

“I never thought about it before. How you are when you aren’t traveling. I wouldn’t have guessed that you make movies,” Rose said. Dave sat back in his seat. Rose got the distinct impression that he wanted to slap his palm to his forehead.

“I mean, I have to pay the bills somehow,” Dave said. “There’s only so many times you can pull the stock market trick before someone notices.”

“He’s lying,” said Rose Lalonde. “He’s in Hollywood because he likes it and he fits in with all the other divas in the industry.”

Dave grumbled, “Rose, my good bitch,” but she cut him off sharply as the lights began to dim.

Rose and the Doctor turned to face the screen, which was starting a dramatic transition into the opening scene. Rose thought she could hear the feminine whisper of Rose Lalonde behind them.

“Thank you for introducing me.”

\--- 

The Doctor threw open the doors of the TARDIS onto a moonlit meadow with a hushed _Ta-da!_ He and Rose stepped out into knee-high grass, colorless, illuminated in a corridor of light leading from the open door of the police box. Rose looked up to see unfamiliar stars and a pair of moons in bright, unreal colors. Magenta and a leafy green.

"Welcome to Alternia," said the Doctor, with his usual panache. "Home planet of the mighty Alternian race of trolls, cradle of culture and cinema, and all the other things that trolls are known for in the galaxy." He looked around, then shut the door of the TARDIS to better search for lights on the horizon. "That's strange, I thought there was a city here." He located a bright haze in the sky at one end of the meadow. "Ah, there we go."

They hiked through the meadow to reach the dull outskirts of an alien city. It was crowded with black high-rises in whimsical brutalist style, the smell of something that was both appetizing and unsettling to the stomach, and lights that were just a touch too low for Rose to see comfortably. The Doctor steered her down a street that was lined with vehicles, or perhaps they were beasts of burden instead. They struck Rose as an unnatural cross between caterpillars and Volkswagen beetles.

A rough voice shouted out from behind Rose and the Doctor. "Hey, what the FUCK?l" They turned around and set eyes on its source, which was a gray person dressed all in black. Overall, it was not the most alien alien that Rose had ever seen. It had two arms and two legs and a head with humanish features and proportions. It was shorter than either Rose or the Doctor, and overall had a serrated and feral sort of air to it. It was carrying what was clearly a plastic grocery bag in one hand, and a sharp pointed sickle blade in the other.

"Good evening, young man," said the Doctor. "Do you know the way to the theater?"

"The theater?!" said the kid, in a tone that betrayed fantastic aggravation. Rose wondered how old this "young man" was, and how big the adults on Alternia got to be. "They'll cull you before you get to the main street! Get the hell off the roads before someone sees!" He jumped past them and threw open the door to a building just ahead, then motioned urgently with his sickle until Rose and the Doctor followed him inside.

He ushered them through the deserted lobby and into the stairwell, which was probably more private. He dropped his grocery bag on the floor and produced a second sickle for his empty hand.

"You wanna tell me what the fuck two HUMANS are doing on Alternia?" he said. He waved the sickles dramatically, but did not actually touch Rose or the Doctor.

"Just came for a visit," said the Doctor.

"How'd you get past the orbital defense? The asteroid veil?! THE GRUBFUCKING IMPERIAL FLEET?!?" The expression of rage on his face was comical.

"We've got a very clever spaceship." The troll in front of them snarled and rubbed at his eyes with his fingers fisted around sickle handles. "Though I do have a question," said the Doctor. "Can you tell me what sweep it is on the Alternian calendar?"

"Oh no. Oh, no no no," said the troll kid. "I can't handle this tonight. Any minute now, my heart will give out in an aortic aneurism of misery and torment. All of the sponge in my head will gush out of my ears like a stampede of mice fleeing a barn fire, because any FUCKING second now, you're going to tell me that you two are time travelers!" he spat.

There was a heavy beat of silence. "Well," said Rose. "We don't have to tell you. We just want to know what, er, sweep it is."

The boy told them a number, which seemed unreasonably high to Rose. The Doctor's brow furrowed.

"Blasted navigation," he muttered. "We're close, but we've gone and landed before the Revolution." He grabbed her arm in a firm, anxious grip. "Come on, Rose, we should try and get back to the TARDIS."

"Oh no, you're not going out there," said the kid, blocking their path with an outstretched sickle. "Do you even have weapons?"

"No, we're not armed," said the Doctor.

"Then you're coming with me until the danger’s gone," said the kid. "I have…connections. You can wait out the drones and then move under cover of daylight."

"I thought the Alternian sun was deadly."

"Not exactly. Some trolls can stand it. Most humans can, too."

"And how would you know about humans," said the Doctor, "Considering that the Alternian fleet doesn't make contact with human beings for another three hundred sweeps?"

The kid just scowled at him and bent to pick up his grocery bag. He began stomping his way upstairs, with the Doctor and Rose following behind. They exited the stairwell several floors up, and Rose looked down a hallway with apartment doors on each side. It looked a lot like Earth, only no interior designer on Earth would have endorsed black walls and a vomit-green carpet.

Their guide picked out a door and started banging on it with the butt of one sickle handle. "CAPTOR!" he shrieked. "Open the goddamned door right now, I am not in the fucking mood for it tonight!" He trailed off into a rumbling growl that jittered something just north of Rose's kidneys. "CAPTOR!"

The lock clicked and the door swung open, and their guide yanked Rose and the Doctor inside.

Inside was an apartment, which was small and dirty in equal measures. There was a living room, and what was obviously a kitchen shoved into one corner, and a doorway that Rose figured led to a bedroom and a bath. There was just enough room in the main space for someone to walk five paces, but they would be tripping over clutter with every step. The contents of an entire laundry basket were scattered around on the couch and the floor. There was an overturned plastic tub full of brightly colored little grub creatures, and the coffee table was piled high with dirty dishes. There wasn't anyone in there except for Rose, the Doctor, and the troll boy, who had put his sickles away, and was busying himself with locking the door back, and drawing the chain across.

The kid cursed again and went to leave his grocery bag in the kitchen. "You two can sit down," he said. "But if you mess with anything in this hive, I will rip your heads off with my blunt-ass teeth and pleasure myself with your still-warm neckstubs." The Doctor nodded affably, and he and Rose took seats on the couch.

"What a strange young man--er, troll," said the Doctor, once their new friend was out of earshot. He had disappeared into the bedroom, and now Rose could hear grunting and muffled voices through the wall. "Did you see his horns, Rose? They're so tiny!"

"Oh, did he have horns? I couldn't really tell."

"All trolls have horns, but I imagine someone with horns that small might be sensitive, so we shouldn't mention them. He's been rather helpful and I wouldn't want to lose his favor."

Their troll burst out of the other room, dragging another troll in black behind him. The new kid was tall and thin, with an impressive slouch and a pair of glasses with red and blue lenses. He had four horns on his head, and a symbol in dirty yellow on his shirt. Their troll manhandled (trollhandled?) the kid onto the armchair, then went back to the kitchen.

The new kid examined Rose and the Doctor and sighed. "Ugh. Humans," he said. He had a thick lisp.

"Is this your apartment?" said Rose.

"Yeah. I'm Sollux," said the troll.

"Thollukth?" said Rose.

"No, Tholux," said the Doctor.

"It's _Sollux_," said Sollux.

"Ah," said the Doctor. "Sollux. Sollux Captor!"

"Yeah," said Sollux.

"Well, I'm Rose Tyler, and he's the Doctor," said Rose. "Who's he?" she nodded back to their friend, who was still messing around in the kitchen.

"He's Karkat." The Doctor stiffened, and Sollux looked at him. "Didn't know humans took Titles," said Sollux.

"Oh, I'm not really a human," said the Doctor. "I just look that way." Sollux raised a suspicious eyebrow, but he was cut off when Karkat came back to the living room. He was carrying two bags that smelled like butter and shrimp.

"Troll the idiot," Karkat said to Sollux. "He has no excuse to be late to movie night. And on tonight of all nights." He looked at Rose and the Doctor on the couch with a constipated expression. Sollux sighed and pulled out what must have been a cell phone.

Sollux tapped something out quick and then said, "He's at the door."

Growling, Karkat went over to open the door. Rose turned in her set, curious to see another troll, but she was surprised to see a pale human boy instead.

It was, against all odds, Dave Strider standing in the door.

"Rose and Doc?" he said, then turned to Karkat. "You didn't tell me you invited them to movie night."

Karkat was turning red. "I didn't INVITE them! They were out on the street! Was I just supposed to leave them to get culled? And how do you know them anyway? Is there a stupid idiot club for dumbass time travelers? Are there any other timefuckers out there that I need to know about?"

"Nah, I don't really know any others," said Dave.

The Doctor looked delighted. "Oh, you didn't say that you knew _Dave_," he said to Karkat and Sollux. "Dave, how many trolls do you know, anyway?"

"Uh, 'bout a dozen?" said Dave. He stepped in and left an unsheathed sword in the apartment's umbrella stand.

"Oh, I'd love to talk troll history with you sometime," the Doctor said. "It's just fascinating."

"Sure," said Dave. He got comfortable next to the Doctor on the couch, and Karkat sat on the floor. He distributed the bags of snacks, and then Dave and Karkat started a playful argument about which movie they were going to watch. Or, well, Rose assumed it was playful from Dave’s expression. Karkat seemed to take every word personally. Sollux had the final say because it was his television, and the group of them settled into a movie which had a title too long for Rose to repeat.

The movie was sweet and very different, with an engaging plot. Rose enjoyed it, even when the actors used slang that she had never heard before and made things difficult. They must have been adult trolls; all were bigger and darker than the trolls in the apartment with them. Rose wondered what Sollux's parents were like, and whether Karkat's knew that he was friends with a time traveler.

They watched the whole movie, and then a couple of episodes of an Earth show that Dave had brought with him. Rose thought that she recognized one of the actors, but the show seemed to have come from somewhere in her future. By the time they were through, the dim glow of sunrise was leeching around the edges of the curtains. Dave retrieved his sword, and then he escorted the Doctor and Rose out of the building, through deserted streets and to the meadow on the outskirts of town. The sun was bright, not unbearable, but neither of the trolls would accompany them.

The weirdly-bleached grass swished around their feet, but the rest of the meadow was silent. The ruddy Alternian sunlight filtered down and made Dave's hair look redder than it really was. The TARDIS loomed over them in a familiar way, like an old friend.

"There we are," said the Doctor. "Would you like to stay for tea, Dave?"

"Uh, yeah, okay."

They all went inside, and the Doctor pulled down a lever that sent them spinning off into time. Dave took his tea with an awful lot of sugar and no milk.

"Dave, do you know anything about troll history?" said the Doctor.

"Not really. They're an empire. They do a lot of conquering."

"Hmm, yes I suppose. The empire has been staunchly expansionist for hundreds of sweeps. And within you get rampant hemocasteism, inequality, culling in the streets."

“Yeah, that’s what it’s called, the hemocaste,” said Dave. “Everyone gets sorted according to what color blood they’ve got. Red and brown at the bottom, purple at the top.”

“And the empress at the very top,” said the Doctor, as he took a sip of his tea. “Her blood is always a kind of magenta color. Her Imperious Condescension rules these days, and I must say, she’s probably my least favorite of the troll empresses.” He made an unimpressed look.

“She behind the expansionism?” asked Rose. “And what’s culling mean anyway?”

“It means killing,” said the Doctor. “A troll with a low enough blood color can be killed for no reason, similar to how Black people could be lynched back in the day on Earth. It’s a monstrous tradition, and I wish it had never been started.”

Dave’s face looked like it was made of stone. Rose felt suddenly nervous. “Why did you take us here, then?” she said.

“I didn’t mean to land this early,” he said. “I was aiming for a timepoint after the Revolution, once the Condesce was deposed.” The Doctor took a deep breath. “Really, the next empress is a sweetheart. The empire is a much nicer place, and much better to visit, once Her Imperious Reformation takes control.”

“So, there’s a revolution,” said Dave, his voice carefully flat. “I hadn’t heard about it before.”

“Yes, it’s one of my favorite parts of Alternian history: a group of cross-spectrum dissidents come together to depose a tyrant who has ruled for millennia. All they have are their ideals and each other, and they bring the whole operation down. It really is inspiring.”

Dave chewed a biscuit thoughtfully. “It’d be more inspiring if I knew that my friends would live to see it,” he said. “Karkat and Sollux are real low on the totem pole. They say that they aren’t going to make it very long after they molt.”

“Oh, is that so?” said the Doctor. He sounded kind of sassy. He spun himself in his chair and typed something rapid-fire into the computer terminal behind him. Several pictures flashed across the nearest wall, projected in blue monochrome. They were mugshots of adult trolls, each one with different horns and a different defiant expression. “These are the leaders of the rebellion. Notice anyone familiar?”

The slide show paused on a picture of a troll with short, rounded horns. They just barely rose above coarse, wild hair. The troll’s blunted teeth were bared in a snarl. Dave’s mouth relaxed in surprise. Rose imagined that his eyes were wide behind his sunglasses.

“No way,” said Dave, absently. 

The Doctor hit a button on the console, and the alien words at the bottom of the mugshot resolved themselves into English. They said, “The Unsigned: Leader—still at large.”

“Are you telling me Karkat makes it?”

“The history that I know says that he does—that he becomes an advisor to the new empress after the Revolution succeeds. Thousands of sweeps from now, I’ve met troll children who still know his name.” The Doctor turned off the projection. “But time is always in flux, Dave. Something can still change and throw the whole thing off.”

“So, what do I do?”

“Do the same thing you always do,” said the Doctor. “Do your best.” He patted Dave on the shoulder, but Dave didn’t really react. He was quiet for a while, and then the Doctor dropped him off on Earth. He could make it the rest of the way home.

\---

The Doctor did not consider himself a pessimist. He liked to believe that there was a way out of every bad situation, that every conflict could be resolved with a compromise that made everyone happy. But this did not seem like one of those times.

The conflict between the Doctor and the Cybermen had no resolution that was not his death or theirs. They would not see reason, nor abandon their goals. He could not allow them to achieve their goals while he was still alive. Morally, it was a stalemate. Literally, he was fighting for his life.

Rose and the Doctor had managed to get the last free humans they could find onto the ferry. They would hopefully be safe far away from the Cyber menace. Rose and the Doctor were not so lucky. The TARDIS was several blocks away in an endless city, too far to run to when they were cornered by two dozen foot soldiers.

The Doctor hugged Rose close. The Cybermen approached in unison with lasers held steady by hands that could not miss. The Doctor closed his eyes and missed the crucial moment. He only heard the clunk of a metal helmet hitting the asphalt.

The Doctor looked up and saw Dave Strider standing between him and the Cybermen. Dave was tense, long legs coiled into a swordsman’s stance, with the tip of a white blade leveled at the closest threat. The Cyberman that Dave had just decapitated rolled to a stop on its back in front of its fellows. The crowd of them backed up, out of reach of the sword, and took aim again.

In the blink of an eye, two more of Dave folded out of the thin air. They placed themselves to Dave’s left and right and took up defensive positions. The Doctor blinked hastily in surprise. Looping back around through time like that would be flirting with a tricky paradox.

The Cybermen started shooting, and their momentary standoff dissolved into chaos. The Dave in the center charged forward to stab his blade through metal plating. He was quickly joined by another Dave who leaped out of nowhere, sword flashing white. The defensive Daves used their swords to block laser fire and flashes of metal and bolts of electricity. Whatever Dave’s sword was made out of, it wasn’t conductive to the shocks.

More and more Daves flickered in and out during the fight, called through time to beat back Cybermen who should have overwhelmed the three of them with sheer numbers. Dave sliced metal arms and dodged lasers with acrobatic grace. The Doctor pushed Rose back and reached for his screwdriver to assist. He was able to interfere with their weapons for no more than a second, but it was a second that saved Dave’s life five different times as the Doctor furiously flung his hand back and forth to point at each enemy in turn. The Doctor stepped forward, and one of the defensive Daves jumped feetfirst into the nearest metal chest to join the offense.

One Dave pulled another out of the way of a metallic fist and left his brother to skin his knees on the pavement. The Daves were suffering far less than the Cybermen, who had been whittled down from two dozen to just three. A flurry of new Daves jumped in an out of the space around them. Each Dave stayed only long enough to swing his sword once, and then each was gone again to appear in a different place. They beat the Cybermen into a back-to-back knot, and then with an incongruous _snicker-snak!_ three Daves lopped their heads off cleanly.

The sound of motors and whining lasers was silenced. Six Daves panted in front of the Doctor, who returned his screwdriver to his coat pocket. One by one, each of the Daves straightened up, gripped his sword, and stepped backward to rejoin the fight while it was still going on. One Dave was left standing, with a bruise on the side of his face and a cut across one collarbone that was shallow enough that it had already stopped bleeding.

He flipped his sword into a neat little flourish, and then it disappeared from his hand. The Doctor was sure that it wasn’t gone, just elsewhere, ready to be recalled the very instant that Dave needed it again.

Dave looked past the Doctor, and the determined line of his mouth dropped into dismay. “Oh God, Doc,” he said. “Rose.”

During the fight, she had crumpled to the asphalt behind the Doctor and he had not noticed. Now, at its conclusion, she was laying there in a little pool of blood that was slowly widening at its edges. The blood was coming a flachette wound in her side, and another gash leaked red into her hair. The Doctor dropped to his knees next to her.

“A hospital! The TARDIS—but it’s too far away,” he said. He placed one hand under Rose’s shoulder and the other under her knees and lifted.

“Come with me,” said Dave. “Bro can fix her. It’s faster!” In that moment, the Doctor trusted him completely. Dave grabbed the Doctor’s arm and pulled him along. The Doctor stumbled forward into space…

And he stepped out again into burning heat. Bright light blinded the Doctor momentarily, and he thought vaguely how jealous he was of Dave’s sunglasses. The world spun for a second around him and he involuntarily considered dropping to one knee there on the rooftop. But he was able to stay on his feet when Dave let go of his arm, thankfully.

Dave nearly threw himself off the side of the roof getting down the fire escape, startling a murder of crows that took to the wing in a hurry. The Doctor followed him more carefully, twisting his upped body so that Rose didn’t hit anything. They stopped at the first landing, where Dave slapped a hand flat against a window set into the brick.

There was a man inside, sitting at a desk next to the window. He was wearing headphones and sunglasses that reflected a cluttered computer screen, but he looked up at Dave attentively.

“Bro!” said Dave.

‘Bro’ took in the scene quickly. He opened the window to let them all inside and then he jumped into action. He moved so quickly that he seemed to disappear. He returned as the Doctor was clambering through the window, holding a first aid kit of ridiculous size, packaged in heavy black nylon.

“Futon,” said Bro. The Doctor saw that he was referencing an old black couch in the middle of the room, which faced a large television. The Doctor gently put Rose down across the futon.

Bro elbowed his way past the Doctor to get to Rose. He snapped on a pair of rubber gloves over the sleeveless pair he was already wearing and began to inspect her wound methodically.

“Dave,” said Bro.

“Yeah?”

“Get towels. The guest towels.” Bro looked up at the Doctor as his dexterous fingers continued to probe Rose’s side. “Where else is she hurt?”

“Bumped her head, I think, here.” The Doctor reached over and turned her head so that Bro could see. Dave came back to the futon with a pair of gray towels.

“Dave, check her head. Tell me if it needs stitches.” Bro was already reaching to withdraw a sterile needle from the first aid kit. In no time at all, he had the wound at her side swabbed and ready. Bro was quick with his needle, and his stitches were very small and very even. The Doctor watched him make each one as Dave applied a bandage to Rose’s scalp.

“Will she be all right?” the Doctor asked.

“Depends,” said Bro. “On how much blood she lost. And if the knife was poisoned.”

“It was a flachette,” said Dave.

“My bad,” said Bro. He nudged the first aid kit with one foot. “Syringe case. Get the one that says H-3.”

The Doctor rifled through the kit and found the thick plastic case. Each of the needles was packaged in plastic and pre-filled. The Doctor realized that he recognized the medicine inside.

“Where did you get these? They won’t be invented for another eighty years.”

“I got ‘em for emergencies,” said Dave. “Here.” He reached out and took the syringe from the Doctor, unwrapped it, flicked it, and stuck it into Rose’s arm. “Should be good, yeah?” he said.

“Yes,” said the Doctor. “Thank you.”

Bro finished his work and they left Rose sprawled on the futon, fresh bandages covered with a flannel blanket. The Doctor adjusted her limbs into a more comfortable position. Dave left for another room down the hall and did not come back. Bro disappeared in a blink, but he reappeared in the kitchen and opened the refrigerator carefully.

Bro looked over at the Doctor. “Beer?” he said.

The Doctor thought about it for a bit, then dipped his head. “Ah, why not? I’ve had a long day.” He got up to join Bro, pulled up a stool and sat beside him at the kitchen island. Bro passed him a brown glass bottle of some local microbrew. It was already starting to sweat through the label.

They sat in silence, a silence that Bro drew around himself like he was born to it. The Doctor was not as experienced at staying quiet, so he filled the silence the best way he knew how: with small talk.

“You raised a good boy, that Dave. I’m always glad to meet him on the road.” Bro didn’t say anything, so the Doctor continued: “Met some of his friends, too, they’re all good sorts. Scientists and revolutionaries and artists, some of the best people in the galaxies.” There was a long pause. Bro took a deliberate and drawn-out sip of his beer. “Do you have any idea why he can do that? Time travel, I mean. Even the Time Lords had to use machines to travel through the years, but Dave just steps through.”

There was another silence, but from the slight cant of Bro’s head, the Doctor thought that he might be considering how to answer. Bro finally spoke. “Dave’s Mom,” he said, “is a scientist. She knows everything about astrophysics ‘n particle physics ‘n shit. She has no idea how he does it.”

The Doctor nodded, mouth open. It was the most he had heard Bro speak. His voice was a deep drawl, with the occasional clipped vowel. 

“You’re supposed to be smart, arent’cha, Doctor?” said Bro. “How ‘bout this. If you ever figure it out, you can tell me.” Bro Strider pulled a slip of paper from his pants pocket and slid it across the table to the Doctor.

The Doctor furrowed his brow. Scratched onto the paper was a screenname, probably for the same messaging system that Dave used. “You called me Doctor,” the Doctor said. “Have we already met?”

Bro Strider grunted and held the Doctor in a long look. “Several times. Got pictures if you want ‘em.”

Pictures of the Doctor in the future. The idea was tempting, but the Doctor grit his teeth. He didn’t want to see the changes just yet. “No thanks. I don’t like crossing my own wake like that.”

Bro snorted. “If you say so.”

Rose stirred on the futon. The Doctor abandoned his beer and went to help her sit up. Once she was better, they would find Dave and have him return them to the TARDIS. 

\---

One the fridge in Bro and Dave Strider's apartment, there is a list, written on white printer paper, and held to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a throwing star.

Bro Strider’s Rules for Dave:

  1. <strike>No time travel.</strike> <strike>No time travel without Bro</strike>. No time travel without permission.
  2. Always be cool.
  3. No traveling without a sword. Be ready to defend yourself.
  4. Don’t tell anyone about the time travel unless Bro approves.
  5. Retroactive paradox approval does not count as approval.
  6. <strike>No looping</strike>. <strike>All loops must be approved by Bro.</strike> No more than 3 Daves in the apartment at a time.


	2. Martha: Hard Times on the Battleship Rebellion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's Rebellion time! I was excited about this chapter because I love the idea of Sollux at the helm of a starship. Since this story features the trolls as adults, some liberties have been taken with their canon personalities and situations. Essentially, all 12 of the beta trolls are the officers of the rebellion for reasons that are both personal and ideological. Those trolls that are assholes have been softened a little so that that would fit better. You may notice that a few beloved characters are only mentioned, and they don’t appear on-screen. Honestly, I didn’t trust myself to write them properly. I can only do so much. Here’s a quick guide to who has what title:   
Aradia: Deadhorn  
Tavros: Wrangler  
Sollux: Darkhelm  
Karkat: Unsigned  
Nepeta: Huntress  
Kanaya: Madrigal  
Terezi: Sunsight  
Vriska: Brainweb  
Equius: Engineer  
Gamzee: Mirthful  
Eridan: Wavesign  
Feferi: the Heiress right now, Her Imperious Reformation on ascension

The TARDIS set down with a _clang!_ on the metal deck of a spaceship. It had done so often enough that Martha had memorized the sound. She and the Doctor stepped out carefully into a dim corridor that felt slightly refrigerated. The dark walls of the corridor were austere and military-looking, but at least the air was breathable.

The Doctor scampered to a computer terminal set into the wall. It was dark.

“Let’s see what kind of ship this is, shall we?” he said. He pulled out his screwdriver and had the terminal lit up in short order.

“Hmm, ah,” he said to himself. He shifted his posture, typed something in, and addressed Martha. “This is an Alternian ship, and based on the date, we’ve landed near the beginning of the Revolution. I wonder which side we’re on…” He continued fiddling with the computer terminal. Martha tried to remember whether the Doctor had mentioned Alternians or their Revolution before.

“Oh, here it is!” The Doctor’s face lit up. “This ship is the Battleship Rebellion, and it’s good luck we found them. They seem to be having some distress.” By this point, Martha had turned away from him, the better to hear the footsteps coming down the corridor.

The Doctor looked up at her as the footsteps increased in volume. Whoever was coming must have been wearing heavy boots.

Booted feet turned the corner and entered Martha’s view. Their owner also entered Martha’s view. He was an alien, and he was extremely large.

“Oh my,” said Martha.

The alien, who must have been Alternian, had more muscle mass than Martha had ever seen on a person before. His skin and hair were shiny black and covered in sweat. His head was crowned with brightly-colored horns, but one was broken jaggedly halfway through.

A horn was not the only thing the man had broken. He peered down at them through the cracked lenses of square glasses, and when he opened his mouth to speak, Martha could see that several of his teeth were also broken.

His voice was deep and rumbly, but articulate. “Who are you? What are you doing on this ship?” he said.

The Doctor came closer and gave the alien a little wave. “Oh my, you’re very large,” said the Doctor.

“Flattery will not help you,” said the alien, tonelessly.

“I’m the Doctor,” said the Doctor.

“I’m Martha.”

The big alien considered them. “I am the Engineer,” he said. “I have heard of the Doctor before. Are you not friends with Mr. Strider?”

Martha tried to decide if calling someone ‘the Engineer’ was as strange as calling someone ‘the Doctor.’ She did not reach a conclusion before the Doctor jerked behind her.

“You know Strider? Yes, he’s a friend of mine, a good friend, even. How do you know him?”

“Strider knows the Captain,” said the Engineer. “If you are willing, then I would ask for your help.” He nodded toward the computer terminal. “You may have seen that this ship is in distress.”

“I’m perfectly willing,” said the Doctor. “I’m always happy to help. Martha?”

Martha sighed and hoped very hard that the other people on this ship weren’t as big and scary as the Engineer. “All right, as long as we don’t get shot at. How can we help?” she said. 

“The problem is with the engines.” The Engineer turned and started to lead them through the ship.

“So how come you’re called the Engineer?” said Martha. 

The Engineer side-eyed her from behind his glasses. “I am very good at engineering things,” he said. “When the time came for me to select my title, my friends encouraged me to emphasize my intelligence over my strength.”

“Does everyone get a title?”

“Everyone who lives to adulthood.”

“Not a lot of trolls manage that,” said the Doctor. “Picking one’s adult name is an important rite of passage in Alternian culture.”

“Did you get the idea from them, then? Of being called the Doctor?”

The Doctor scoffed, and Martha noticed that the Engineer’s nostrils flared out. “Oh no,” said the Doctor. “I suspect they got the idea from my people, but they could have come up with it on their own.”

“Oh.”

The Engineer led them to a door marked “Engine Room.” Martha was very glad that things were going as expected. They had an Engineer, who engineered things, and he worked in the engine room. The door was heavy metal that should have slid open from the center, but the Engineer had to grip it with both hands at the seam and pull it apart. It looked like it took him very little effort.

“Your doors broken?” said the Doctor.

The Engineer grunted. “We are on emergency power. Only life support systems are being sustained.” He held the door open so that Martha and the Doctor could step into the engine room.

The room was hung liberally with wires and metal conduits, and some kind of purple, slimy tendrils, that dripped periodically onto the damp floor. The sides of the room were densely occupied with huge metal boxes, bolted together roughly, and with translucent tanks. The tanks contained wafer-thin scraps of circuit board, floating organlike and buoyed by streams of bubbles from underneath. Martha felt vaguely disgusted. The Doctor looked solemn. They followed the Engineer to the center of the room, which had been cleared out for a long workbench and a single lit computer terminal.

The Doctor turned in a slow circle. “Your engine doesn’t seem to be working at full power,” he said.

The Engineer gently lifted a component from the workbench and examined it. “The engine is drawing no power at all,” he said. “That is the cause of our distress.”

“And you want my help to fix it?” said the Doctor.

“Doctor, if an Imperial ship found us in this condition, we would be defenseless. The Rebellion would end with our extinction. The engine must be repaired posthaste.”

The Doctor stuck a hand to his chin. “I suppose I can try,” he said. “But, you Alternians always build your engines so strangely. Tell me, is this ship running a traditional Helm Drive?”

“The Helm Drive that this ship uses is…nontraditional,” said the Engineer. He set the little piece of machinery back on his workbench and grabbed a thick spanner. A bead of sweat rolled down his arm. “I designed most of it myself. The capacitors and amplifiers have allowed the engine to draw greater power from the Helm, and they allow the ship to run at full strength even when the Helm is…offline.”

The Doctor tilted his head. “What do you mean offline? Helms don’t go offline--the Helmsmen are wired into the ship. A Helm Drive only goes offline when the pilot dies.” The Doctor’s voice was quiet and dangerous. There was a fury burning in his eyes.

The Engineer started to sweat some more. “Yes, in all other ships, Helmsmen are permanently installed.” Martha tried to understand what he meant by that. She imagined a spaceship pilot chained to his chair with thick manacles. “But this ship is different, Doctor. The Rebellion would not stand for the enslavement of a psionic in its flagship. Darkhelm is a full member of this crew, with the same rights as any other officer.”

Martha spoke up: “Darkhelm’s the pilot, then? What do you mean, about enslavement?”

The Engineer’s expression stayed the same, but he continued to sweat heavily. His tank top soaked steadily. “It is…rude to speak of such things.”

“Oh, like it’s rude to kidnap young trolls and make them into batteries?” the Doctor said. He crossed his arms in front of himself. “Martha, the Alternian empire was powered with the lives of its subjects. They ran their starships using the brains of Alternian psions, wired into the engines and tortured for their power until they died and were replaced.” He looked long and sad at the Engineer, who removed his glasses and wiped them gently. His eyes were deep blue instead of white, and ringed with blue bruises.

“It is my hope that the ships of the future do not rely on such barbaric systems,” said the Engineer, sincerely. He looked the Doctor right in the eyes, then replaced his glasses, carefully. “In the meantime, I will continue to improve the Helm system so that it does not cause stress to my pilot.”

The Doctor studied the Engineer for a long minute. “Well, we might as well get to work, then. I’ve wanted to see a cruelty-free Alternian Helm for a very long time, and this broken one won’t do.”

The Engineer flashed a shy smile full of broken teeth. He moved to start removing panels from the floor and the boxes that lined the walls. The Doctor got his screwdriver out.

“Do you know where the problem is, Engineer?”

“I do not.”

“Is it hardware, software, or wetware?” he asked.

“I do not know. Darkhelm is testing the software and I am testing the hardware. We will check the wetware if we do not find any problems with the others.” Martha looked dubiously at the components floating through the tanks. The Doctor sat himself down by the computer terminal, and they got to work.

Martha sat in that room with the Engineer and the Doctor while they worked. She corralled all of the big metal bolts left on the floor as the Engineer opened each of the metal boxes, one after another, like a series of treasure chests. She acted as a sounding board for the Doctor, when he came across something in the computer terminal that interested him. The Engineer did not speak as he worked, except to say “fiddlesticks” quietly, to himself, every so often.

There was the soft patter of feet on the corridor outside, and then another alien leaped into the engine room. Martha looked up first, because everyone else was better occupied.

The new person was the same species as the Engineer, but she seemed to be his polar opposite. Where he was large, she was compact, only as tall as Martha’s shoulder, and dressed in a coat that was two sizes too big. She exuded an effusive energy. Her horns were short and wide, her eyes were muddy green, and her mouth was stretched into a curled-lip smile that showed off pristine, needle-sharp teeth.

“Oh, sugar grub!” she sing-songed. “You didn’t tell me we had visitors.”

The Doctor looked up from the terminal. The Engineer mopped sweat from his thick jaw.

“Kitten,” he said. “I have been busy.” There was no affection in his voice, but a deep blue blush was lightening his entire face. He was fighting to keep his cool.

The woman giggled with one hand held to her mouth. She was wearing thick gloves. “Captain called a meeting in ten minutes! He wants a report on your purr-ogress,” she said to the Engineer. “You can clean up and I’ll show your new friends the way.” She looked at Martha and the Doctor with glee.

The Engineer sat stiffly. “Very well. Don’t frighten them, please,” he said.

The woman saluted the Engineer and blew him a kiss in that order, then she waved Martha and the Doctor out of the room and into the hall. “I’m the Huntress!” she said brightly.

“Good to meet you, I’m the Doctor.”

“I’m Martha.”

“Where’d you come from?” said the Huntress.

“Well we were passing through, and we saw that your ship was in trouble. I’d like to consider myself a friend of the Rebellion, so we stopped to help.” The Huntress accepted his explanation with a nod. The Doctor waggled an eyebrow at her. “By the way, are you and the Engineer committed?” he said.

She giggled again. “We’ve been together for eight sweeps!”

“Really? Which quadrant?”

“Pale! He’s such a sweetie.”

“I’m sorry,” said Martha. “What’s a quadrant?”

The Huntress practically started vibrating. The Doctor spoke: “Alternians do romance differently than humans do. They split into four different partnerships based on compatibility.”

The Huntress lectured enthusiastically to Martha and the Doctor about what the different quadrants mean, with examples pulled from her crewmates and friends. Her own relationship with the Engineer was a focal point of the lesson. The names and quadrants blurred together in Martha’s brain, and she retained very little of the information. After that whirlwind blew itself out, they reached a conference room, and the Huntress showed them inside.

There were several other Alternians already assembled in the conference room. There was a brown-eyed man sitting at one corner of the table, who had horns that extended three times the width of the rest of his body. The woman standing across from him was fingering the top of a dragon-headed cane and grinning a sharp smile to herself. At the head of the table were two figures, one short and stubby, the other tall and graceful. The graceful one was a shapely woman wearing a dress that was both practical and flattering. Her skin was paler than the other Alternians, and one of her horns was angled into a slim barb. She stood next to a tense man with wild hair and short horns. He was dressed in a black and gray military jacket with a high collar. His eyes were a burning blood red.

When the Doctor saw the man at the head of the table he broke into a grin. “I thought I might find you on this ship, Unsigned. It’s been ages! Last time I saw you, you were, oh yea high.” The Doctor marked a point at the bottom of his rib cage.

The man across the table snarled and clenched one hand into a fist. “It’s been four perigees, timefucker,” he said in a rough voice. “Try and keep a linear count for once in your useless life.”

“Well I can see you haven’t changed a bit! As for linearity, I don’t think we can expect that any time soon. Have you all met Martha?”

“Hi,” said Martha. She gave a little wave to the aliens in the conference room. “I’m Martha Jones.”

“Yes, yes, another lady human running amok on the ship, I guess you want introductions or something,” said the Unsigned. He pointed to himself and set his flat red gaze on Martha. “Unsigned,” he said. “I’m the Captain.”

The woman on his right stepped forward. Her own eyes were jade green and piercing. “I am first mate Madrigal,” she said.

The man with the wide horns did not look Martha in the eye. “I’m, um, the Wrangler.”

The last lady in the room increased the size of her grin. Her teeth looked flat and triangular, like a shark’s. “I am Sunsight,” she said in a grating, nasally voice. She inhaled deeply while the reflection from her mirrored glasses nearly blinded Martha. “And you two smell lovely!” Martha elected not to consider what exactly she meant.

The whole party sat down around the table. Huntress took a chair next to Sunsight, and nobody sat next to the Wrangler for fear of being whacked with his horns every time he turned his head. The Engineer joined them and sat between the Huntress and the Doctor.

“Okay, now is the time when everyone gives me their fucking progress reports!” said the Unsigned. He whipped an arm around to point at Sunsight.

She sniffed the air and rose to her feet dramatically. “I have no progress to report,” she said cheerfully.

“Bullshit,” said the Captain.

“It’s true. Since we started having engine troubles, I have not received scheduled communications from Brainweb or our Heiress. You won’t let me in on your special secret plan with Mirthful, so I have no information on that venture, and the last communique that I got from Wavesign was just more of the same. I can read back his report, if you want…”

“Ugh, no thanks,” said the Unsigned. “Pass on that. Just be ready to resume coordinating our agents once the power’s back on. Next!”

Sunsight spun her cane into an elaborate salute that involved almost bonking herself on the forehead. She sat down smoothly, and the Huntress stood. “Wrangler and I are working with the recruits,” she said. “I’m putting together a team for our next raid, and we’re hoping to get enough medical supplies to start stocking a full-time clinic on board!”

Madrigal looked up from where she had been taking notes. “If you want to start staffing a real medical bay, then we will need bodies to fill it,” she said. “I will have to perform an evaluation of your recruits in order to select suitable assistants.”

“Okay!” said the Huntress.

“Next!” said the Unsigned, again. He turned his angry gaze to the Engineer.

The Engineer, predictably, started to sweat. “I discovered these aliens in corridor 4B. I allowed them to stay and assist me when I learned that they were the Doctor and his companion, since you have mentioned a history with these people before.” He sat straight-backed and did not fidget as he continued: “I checked all major power channels and both banks of capacitamplifiers in the engine, but I found no malfunction. My inventions are faultless.”

“Okay, stop fondling yourself,” said the Unsigned. “What next?”

“I will collaborate with Darkhelm on the software, and then we will check the wetware installations.”

“And Deadhorn?”

“Her batteries ran out last night. She will be able to recharge once we are off emergency power.”

Unsigned skipped over Martha and the Doctor to point at Wrangler. Wrangler hunched in, seemed to catch himself, and then puffed out his chest. “I’m working with Huntress on the recruits. It’s going well. Um, the training, that is. I think that we, uh, could have ground troops enough to overwhelm an Outpost-class Orbital Station once they’re fully trained. Maybe two perigees?”

“Okay, fuck, okay,” said the Unsigned to himself. He looked at the trolls around the table and the expression on his face softened for half a second. He slammed a fist down on the table. “You’re dismissed! Get to work. Sunsight, we’ll have a meeting about the agents later, when we’re not dead in the water. And you two!” He pointed to Martha and the Doctor. “Stay behind, I’ll figure something out.” 

The room cleared as the officers went to attend to their business. Madrigal left last. Once she had stepped out, the Unsigned folded his arms on the table in front of him and dropped his face on top of them. Martha could see the lightest parts of his horns peeking out of his thatch of hair.

“Are you all right?” said Martha.

“I have never in my life been all right, it’s fine,” he said. The sound was muffled through his arms, but still understandable. He looked up. “Where are you right now?”

“Where am I?” said the Doctor. “I’m on this spaceship, floating through the outskirts of Alternian controlled space.”

“No, I don’t mean where in space!” Unsigned spat. “I mean in time you idiot. You’re the grub-fondling time traveler in the blue box—you should really have this figured out by now! I keep a lockstep with Strider, but you are an endless fucking mystery.”

“Oh,” said the Doctor. “I don’t know how specific I can be. Um, I’m the tenth, if that means anything to you. I’m traveling with Martha right now, and the last time I saw you, you were a child. Still on the homeworld.”

“Okay, which time on Homeworld? The time with the zombies and Madrigal? The cult thing?”

“No, not those. That sounds exciting, though. We had movie night. Dave Strider was there, and Sollux.”

“He’s Darkhelm, now,” said the Unsigned automatically. “And really? Movie night? That was like the first time we met!”

“Yes, it was.”

Unsigned growled to himself and tried to dig his claws into the table. They were too stubby to make much of a dent. “I hate time travel. So much,” he said. “Hang on, how’d you know my name, anyway? I still had my hatchname back then.”

“Oh, I dunno,” said the Doctor as he rubbed his nose. “You’re kind of famous.”

Unsigned’s face took on a cast of despair. “I’m a martyr, I knew it. I’m going to die slowly in public with my blood on the Empress’s boots.” He buried his head in his hands again. “Maybe they’ll pull out the irons and bring my lineage to its thematically appropriate conclusion.”

“Kind of a pessimistic view isn’t it?” said Martha.

“There’s no such thing as pessimism when you’re a mutant marked for death rebelling against an empire that controls millions of worlds. There’s only realism and slightly bloodier realism.”

“Okay, well,” she said. “Try to have a little perspective.”

He just looked at her with an expression of mingled disdain and pity. “You people want to help or something, right?”

“That’s why we’re here,” said the Doctor.

“The most pressing emergency is the engines. You can keep helping with them, I guess. Go ask Darkhelm for work, he’s spread thin and you remember each other. Go two levels down and look for the door with his sign on it.”

“Aye aye, Captain,” said the Doctor. Martha could tell that he was trying to act all reassuring. He gave the Unsigned a quick salute, and they left to find Darkhelm.

The Doctor took them to a door with the sign of Gemini on it. It was closed, so they stood outside for a moment.

“So, you’ve met them before?” Martha said.

“Yeah, they were just kids, though. It’s weird, seeing them all grown up and toppling empires.”

“They grow up so fast,” Martha joked.

The Doctor knocked on the metal door, but there was no sound from inside. The door was another automatic sliding contraption that wouldn’t move under the emergency power, so he jimmied it open with his screwdriver. The inside of the room was lit only by a desk lamp, which cast a searing spotlight beam on the desk and left the rest of the space dark.

Martha caught sight of the troll who must have been Darkhelm, who was slumped half in and half out of the light, with his head tipped back across the headrest of a rolling computer chair. He had twice as many horns as the other Alternians, arrayed in two pairs, but he made up for it by being twice as skinny as any of his crewmates. 

The Doctor reached out with one foot and jostled the computer chair. “Darkhelm,” he said. “Wake up, it’s the Doctor.”

Darkhelm jumped in his seat, and suddenly the room was brighter as a tesla-coil arc of snapping electricity zipped up the gap between Darkhelm’s doubled horns. He swiveled violently in his chair and turned to face Martha and the Doctor, snarling fiercely.

“And that,” said the Doctor to Martha, “is why you should always be careful when you disturb a sleeping troll.”

Darkhelm’s shoulders relaxed abruptly from their rictus. He scrubbed the snarl from his face and blinked bleary eyes at them. Martha was curious to see that his eyes had no pupils, and they were different colors, too. One eye was luminous red and the other was glowing blue like the screen of a stalled computer.

“Holy shit,” said Darkhelm, mangling the ‘sh’ with a heavy lisp. He groped across the desk and found a pair of glasses, which he slipped on. The colored lenses of the glasses matched his abnormal eyes. “Uh, it’s you, the alien Doctor.”

“Just the Doctor is fine,” he said. “And this is Martha.”

“Hello.”

“Ugh,” said Darkhelm. He cracked his neck back into place, and it made the sound of someone biting down on a mouthful of dice. “Okay, here’s a question: what are you doing in my room?”

“Just popped by and talked with the Engineer, and he says you’re having engine trouble. I thought we might help take a look and see what the problem is.”

Darkhelm groaned and heaved himself out of his chair. “What time is it?” he said.

The Doctor told him. Martha didn’t know how he knew, unless he’d been counting out the seconds since he last saw the time on a computer terminal. Darkhelm groaned again.

“Well I can tell you it’s not the software that’s causing the problem, and I’ll bet that Engineer’s checked all the hardware by now, too.”

“He did, we were helping.”

“Then the problem’s in the wetware.” Darkhelm pulled a face.

“What’s wetware anyway?” said Martha.

Darkhelm gave her a look like she was stupid. “If it squishes, it’s wetware,” he said. “Follow me, I’ll show you the installation.”

Darkhelm led them up a narrow ladder to a door that looked at least a foot thick. There was the smell of ozone and a soft static crackle, and the door shot open. Darkhelm removed his glasses, folded them, and hooked them around the stained collar of his shirt. The light from his glowing eyes illuminated the room beyond.

The room was dominated by a thick chair with a tall headrest. Twining around all parts of the chair were those same purple tendrils that Martha noticed in the engine room. There were no windows in the room, nor any lights that she could see, just a computer terminal that jutted from the wall to the left, too far for someone to reach from the chair. The screen was blank except for a red cursor bar, beating steadily against the black. The rest of the wall was crisscrossed with more tendrils, which gleamed wetly in the dim light cast by Darkhelm’s eyes.

He looked around and illuminated each corner of the room in turn, and Martha was reminded of those headlamps that miners wear, which always cast light on the thing that you’ look at. Darkhelm seemed satisfied with the setup as it was, and he crossed the room over to the computer terminal and began typing furiously.

“I’ve got a question,” said the Doctor.

“What?” said Darkhelm, as he continued typing.

“This ship clearly has some kind of auxiliary computer system, since I was able to access digital records from the engine room earlier, when you were offline. What kind of system runs the ship when you’re not in it?”

Darkhelm looked around. “That’s a good question actually,” he said. “It’s not exactly an auxiliary system—it’s more like a secondary system, running on an apiary network. The secondary system can run simple stuff on its own, and it acts independently when I’m not connected.”

“And when you’re in the Helm, does it shut off?”

“Of course not, I just interface. It’s complicated, but the mainframe accommodates my processor kind of like a scaffold around it. It’s necessary to parse a lot of my outputs and keep internal logic consistent. The boost in processing power to the network gives the ship’s computer enough juice to make the heavy calculations.”

“Ah, I see.” The Doctor nodded in understanding. Martha did not nod in understanding. She could feel that her eyes had glazed over.

“I’ll give you a demonstration once the Engineer gets here,” said Darkhelm. “Where is that blue-blooded bastard?”

The Engineer knocked politely on the doorframe with one meaty fist. “Watch your language,” he said.

Darkhelm just said, “No.”

The Engineer was carrying a thick canvas bag full of tools. He began to remove a small contingent of things that looked like cyborg spiders, with long wires for legs and digital readouts on their heads. He began sticking the wires into the tendrils that were wrapped around the chair and up the walls. Once he had arranged them to his satisfaction, he nodded at Darkhelm, who typed something into the computer. The Engineer consulted the numbers on the spider meters and then rearranged them across the room. He and Darkhelm repeated the process of checking and moving the spiders several times.

After several cycles of moving the little robot spiders, Darkhelm and the Engineer gave up. 

“All biowires and conduits are functioning as intended,” said the Engineer.

Darkhelm groaned and rubbed a hand over his face. “Bullshit.” He pointed a skinny finger at the Engineer’s chest. “If it was working as intended, then there wouldn’t be any faulty connections.”

“Try and be more understanding please: the wires are not normally meant to be removable and all of these cultures are untested. Perhaps they have a shorter lifespan.”

“Well, we can’t exactly pick up any new components out here in space, can we?” said Darkhelm spitefully.

“We should check—”

“Yes, I know! Just get ready to jack me in.” Darkhelm put his glasses down and then stripped out of his shirt. Suddenly, Martha could see the boundary of every muscle and ligament on his chest. He looked inhuman under his shirt, with no belly button or nipples, and the layout of his ribs was all wrong. His sternum wasn’t the right shape. It didn’t help that he was unnaturally skinny compared to the other Alternians.

Darkhelm turned, and Martha could see patches of abraded skin running up and down both sides of his spine. The irritated areas were paler than the rest of his thick hide and tinted slightly yellow. He threw his shirt on the floor to rest next to the Engineer’s toolbag, then he lifted himself into the chair. There was a pair of upright handles on the armrests, which Darkhelm gripped tightly.

“Ready to receive?” Darkhelm asked the Engineer. He clenched his jaw.

“Affirmative.”

At the same time, Darkhelm pulled back on the handles and the Engineer hit a button on the console. There was a soft _shlorp _sound, and Darkhelm’s whole body tensed for a split second, then each of his muscles relaxed in unison. His head dipped forward ever so slightly, and Martha could see that the tendrils on the chair were holding it upright. They had burrowed their hair-thin ends into the hidden skin of his scalp, and Martha’s stomach clenched when she realized that they had also worked their way into the irritated patches along his spine. She recalled medical school diagrams of the human nervous system and tightened her hands into fists.

“Give him a second to get his bearings,” said the Engineer.

Two seconds passed, and a line of text rolled across the console unprompted.

“Network holding steady so far,” said the Engineer. “Use the speakers, please. I don’t want everyone crowding the terminal just to hold a conversation.”

“Ugh, fine,” said Darkhelm’s voice. Martha gasped when she realized that his mouth did not move, and the sound came instead from hidden speakers in the walls. His body remained limp and unmoving in the chair.

“Impressive assimilation, gentlemen,” said the Doctor, as he continued to observe. “Does the process hurt much?”

Darkhelm answered from the speakers. “Only for half a second—I have routines running that block the pain signals.” His lisp was not eliminated by the computer.

“Hmm, that’s preferable, I suppose. Are you generating power right now?”

“No power,” said the Engineer. “The risk of combustion is too great. We are only checking the network for now. Please give me a ship status report.”

Darkhelm’s voice sounded robotic at the edges while it ran through a summary: “Helm Drive offline. Emergency power engaged. Available systems: life support. Suspended systems: sublight propulsion, warp drive, communications and scanning, cloaking and stealth, weapons systems. Stored power at 8% capacity.”

“And the network?” said the Engineer.

“Hives 1 through 4, 6, and 7 are processing at peak efficiency. Hive 5 needs to be checked for pollen levels and internal temperature: processing efficiency has dropped by 13%. Helmsman processor is operational at 64% peak speed. Synchronization is at 85% and dropping.”

“Troubleshoot the synchronization drop.”

Darkhelm’s voice regained some of its life: “I have no fucking idea where the bottleneck is, and the algorithms are useless here.”

“Well, it’s either in the secondary or the primary system, and—”

“Touch my bees and burn to death slowly,” said Darkhelm. “It’s not them. I’ve been running network checks on the hives all day. The problem’s in the brain or in the brain-network connection.”

“Run diagnostics on the brain processing, then. 64% is low.”

“I was asleep half an hour ago. Cut me some slack and give me two minutes for the diagnostic,” said Darkhelm. A progress bar appeared on the computer terminal.

“I have no idea what’s going on and it’s freaking me out,” said Martha. “Do you mean _his_ brain, or is there another brain in the computer somewhere?”

“It’s his brain in the computer,” the Doctor said. “Or, it would be more accurate to say that his brain _is _the computer. The Alternians are wizards at building biological computers, but a person’s brain is still greater by several orders of magnitude. The ship is using Darkhelm’s brain to run all of its calculations, and he’s in there giving it orders and tweaking things, so everything works right.” He turned to look at the Engineer, thoughtfully. “Maybe the trouble is he’s caught a virus. Who has access to the base code and the operating files?”

“Darkhelm has the only access. He coded the systems himself for maximum security and nobody else has permissions. It is unlikely that there is a virus in the system.”

“You’re damn right,” said Darkhelm. “This shit is locked tight. Diagnostic has revealed negligible corruption and data loss. I ran a quick defrag, and processing is now at 66%. Synchronization at 76% and dropping.”

The Engineer sighed, and his shoulders slumped minutely. Darkhelm’s body, still in the chair, did not so much as twitch. The Doctor put a hand to his chin in thought.

“So, when you calibrated the cables, did you do it at night or during the day? Maybe his circadian rhythm’s messing things up and the bottleneck is in the brain hormones,” he offered.

The Engineer was silent for a long moment. He removed his glasses with exaggerated slowness and then smacked himself in the forehead.

“Goddamit,” said Darkhelm through the speakers. “Could someone please pick up my hand and do the same to my body? I swear I deserve it.”

“Is it the circadian rhythm, then?”

“Not exactly,” Darkhelm said. “I haven’t kept a normal sleep schedule for sweeps because of my disorder. But I’ll bet a million of any currency you care to name that it’s the brain chemistry causing the bottleneck, because we never actually calibrated these cables to me. What was it we did, Engineer?”

The Engineer grimaced as he replaced his glasses. “We calibrated the cables using output and processing scores from an average goldblood psionic. Most likely, the low synchronization is due to discrepancies in Darkhelm’s strength and mood regulation.”

“It’s probably synaptic feedback messing with the physical interface, ugh. For a pair of geniuses, we sure are stupid,” said Darkhelm. “I’ll jack out and we’ll recalibrate.”

“There’s no need—” the Engineer started.

“Engineer, I know for a fact that calibration sucks when you’re in the rig. You have all my specs, so you can do it while I take a piss.”

There was a pause. “Fine,” said the Engineer.

Martha registered the hiss of slimy needle-wires retracting back into the chair. Darkhelm made a muffled gasping noise as he took control of his own breathing back from whatever computer program had it before.

“Thanks,” he said, with his mouth this time. He stretched formerly limp arms over his head. A crackle of blue and red electricity snapped his shirt off the floor and into Darkhelm’s hand. He replaced the shirt onto his torso and left the room.

When Darkhelm returned, he was carrying a tall travel mug of something that steamed and smelled atrocious.

“Ugh, what is that?” said Martha.

Darkhelm looked at her, or at least he turned his head in her direction. It was hard to tell where he was looking when he didn’t have pupils. “Technically, it’s starship fuel,” he said. “I need the caffeine, or I get migraines.”

“You get migraines from this setup?” said the Doctor.

Darkhelm scowled. “No, I’ve had migraines my whole life. It’s not the Helm.” He looked down at his mug and then shrugged and started to chug. The Engineer made a face and averted his eyes from the scene.

Once Darkhelm had finished and the Engineer had declared that calibrations were complete, Darkhelm hopped into the chair once more. He and the Engineer set things up more carefully that time. They draped Darkhelm’s shirt over one armrest and the Engineer began a countdown before the wires connected to Darkhelm’s body all at once.

They ran through the same checks, only this time the network was restored. Darkhelm and the Engineer ran scans anyway, looking for something faulty in the connection. It felt like it took hours, and there was an anticipation building in the room as more and more scans came back showing that there was no problem.

“Run it again,” said the Engineer.

“As much as I would like to,” said Darkhelm sarcastically, “we’ve already run all the scans twice. The only thing we can do now is restart the Helm Drive and get some power in here.”

“You’re ready to generate?”

“Yeah, I’ve got some juice,” said Darkhelm. “I suspect that the calibration has dropped some of the resistance in the conduits, so I might be able to get the cells back to full power in one go.”

“Don’t hurt yourself,” the Engineer implored.

“Screw you. Don’t patronize me,” said Darkhelm.

“I’m only—”

“Screw. You.”

Lines of text flashed by on the computer terminal, too fast for the Engineer to do anything about them. A tingly, electric feeling built in the room, centered around Darkhelm’s horns and his still-glowing, blank eyes. His voice came over the speakers again, and Martha could hear an echo from the hallway as he addressed the entire crew at once. “Currently bringing Helm Drive back online. Engine crew stand by.”

The Engineer positioned his hands over the computer terminal, poised to interrupt the process.

Darkhelm talked to the Engineer through the speakers. “Capacitors and amplifier connections are holding steady. I’m going to start charging. They need you in the engine room to get us moving again.”

“Right,” said the Engineer. He gathered his toolbag and marched briskly out to the hall. 

Martha noticed that the room was getting brighter. At first, she thought that it was because Darkhelm’s eyes were glowing more strongly than before, but their light was steady and did not change. Instead, it was the tendrils that made up the back of the chair that were glowing. The ones crawling up the walls followed suit, and they glowed brighter until they were nearly incandescent.

“Re-engaging non-emergency systems. Crew members stand by.” There was a pause. “All systems are go. Go about your business. Captain has the com.”

“Wow.” The Doctor looked dazzled by the brilliant light of the Helm. He turned in a circle on the spot. “Drawing power doesn’t hurt?”

“No,” said Darkhelm through the speakers. “It just…pulls. There’s fatigue afterwards, but nothing more than a slight headache.”

“Amazing.”

“Yeah, Engineer did a good job here, but don’t tell him that; he’ll get a big head,” Darkhelm said. “I was always afraid, as a kid, that I would be conscripted into a real Helm. It’s agony in there, and the processor runs at all hours no breaks, but they don’t have any freedom—they’re not in charge like I am. I control this ship, not the other way around.” There was a pause there where Martha thought that Darkhelm wanted to sigh, but since he was talking through a speaker, he couldn’t manage it. “But there’s thousands out there that aren’t so lucky. They’re just batteries, wrung out for power. For sweeps and sweeps and sweeps.”

“I’ve seen,” said the Doctor, with a look of profound sadness on his face. “The Battleship Condescension has been helmed by the same troll for millennia. They don’t even let him die.”

“The Psionic,” said Darkhelm, reverently. The Doctor nodded, grave. “We had heard the legends, but I didn’t know if they were true. They say he’s the most powerful telekinetic in history.”

“Oh, I don’t know, I think you could give him a run for his money. You got those cells charged yet?”

“65%” said Darkhelm.

“You see? Incredible. Anyone else would still be less than halfway.”

Darkhelm didn’t speak for a second, as though he was unused to hearing praise. “Engineer’s gearing us up to take a jump. You’ll want to watch that from the bridge—it’s boring in here.”

“Will you be alright down here?” Martha asked.

Darkhelm approximated a scoff. “I’m in every part of the ship right now, I’m not going to get lonely,” he said. “I’m talking with the Captain right now. He knows you’re coming. Up the ladder and on the left.”

They left Darkhelm in his chair and climbed up the ladder one by one, Martha behind the Doctor. Once they were on the right level, a door slid open for them. The Doctor located the dark lens of a camera high on the wall and nodded his thanks. It might have been Martha’s imagination, but she thought she saw it wink back with a blip of red light.

“Well, get the fuck in here!” The Captain’s voice jumped out of the now-open room. Martha and the Doctor entered the bridge to see him at his command. He was seated in a chair that was too big for him, and the heels of his boots just brushed the metal floor. Madrigal and Sunsight were flanking him on either side. Madrigal greeted Martha and the Doctor and offered them seats at the back of the bridge, far from the window at the front where stars drifted imperceptibly slowly. The Unsigned had eyes locked on a bank of screens where chunks of text and star charts displayed themselves in a dirty yellow font.

“Those bastards say that they did it,” the Unsigned said. “If they didn’t, then we’ll probably be culled within the hour.” He sighed deeply, and Sunsight licked her lips conspicuously. “So, it’s either we live to fight another day, or we get a quick death, and that’s really not so bad. Plus, our odds are good. Darkhelm could fly a dumpster from here to Pegios and back.” An emoticon flashed on the screen in irritating yellow. It was a smug face wearing Darkhelm’s glasses. Unsigned scowled at it. “Hit the jump,” he said.

The stars that had been drifting suddenly jumped across the window. For a second, Martha was certain that not even the TARDIS could move that fast.

\---

“So, you said we were visiting a friend?” said Martha, as she hung on tightly to a handle on the TARDIS’s central column.

“Oh, it’s just Dave,” said the Doctor. “I realized, when we were on the Battleship Rebellion that I hadn’t seen him in weeks, and normally I run into him more often than that. It’s just catching up.”

The TARDIS landed with its customary whooshing sound and the faraway noise of city traffic.

They sat for a moment to gather themselves. Someone knocked on the door from the outside. It was ‘Shave and a Haircut.’

The Doctor knocked ‘two bits’ back on the inside of the door and then opened it to sunlight so bright that it hurt Martha’s eyes. The traffic sounds got louder, and the smell of city smog entered the main room. Wherever it was out there, it was hot.

There was a man standing right outside the door. He was taller than the Doctor, but he slouched so that they came up about equal. He studied them coolly from behind triangle-shaped sunglasses. He was holding a sword.

“Bro Strider!” said the Doctor. He clapped the man on the shoulder with friendly regard. “Good to see you, or maybe to meet you, I don’t know if you’ve met me yet, I’m the Doctor.”

Bro Strider tilted his chin up and shrugged off the Doctor’s hand. He did not put his sword away, but he did step back out of the threshold so that they could come outside.

Outside proved to be the rooftop of a very tall building. The roof was flat all the way around, occupied by a large air conditioning unit, a pair of plastic training dummies, and a boy who was also holding a sword.

“Did you say Doctor?” said the boy, “You’re not the Doctor, but you’ve got the TARDIS.” He looked up at the Doctor and Martha through dark aviator sunglasses. There was no color in his face or hair except for a pink flush from the heat.

“Of course, I’m the Doctor!” said the Doctor. “I’m the Doctor, and you’re Dave Strider, and that’s Bro, and this is Martha.” Martha waved. “We met in Boston, and we watched the tea party, and you had your camera there.”

“But you look different,” said Dave. “Like, way different, like even more than you’ve just had a lot of work done, you know?” He paused and looked at the Doctor’s feet. “I think you’re taller.”

“Well, obviously I got older,” said the Doctor. “You don’t expect me to always look exactly the same, do you? I know for a fact that you change as you get older, and you get taller, too.”

Bro snorted behind them. It was the only sound that Martha had heard him make. Even his footsteps were silent as he left them with Dave on the roof.

Dave looked hard at the Doctor. His face was frozen without expression. “Doc,” he said, “are you trying to tell me that you went through puberty?”

Martha put a fist up to her face to hide her grin. The Doctor chuckled. The sun beat down on an apartment building in Houston while Martha and the Doctor talked with a boy who swung his practice sword in feinted strikes at the nearest dummy. The Doctor spoke as though he was comfortable with Dave’s peculiar cadence, but Dave never betrayed much familiarity with the Doctor.

Later, Martha asked the Doctor about what Dave had said, about how the Doctor looked different. He showed her a picture, a glossy print in full color. The picture showed Dave Strider, a few short years older than his thirteen-year-old self, and a blonde woman in a pink jacket, and a man in a leather jacket with short hair. “That’s me,” said the Doctor, pointing to the man in the middle of the photo. “Dave took this one in ancient Rome, or he will take it when he’s older, really, it’s hard to keep these things straight.” Martha’s mouth opened in surprise as she took the photograph. 

It raised more questions than it answered. Why did the Doctor look so strange? He insisted that he was the same Doctor as the man in the photo, even if they were different. Same parts, he said, just rearranged differently. More curious was the woman in the picture next to him. Was that her? Was that Rose Tyler?


	3. Donna: The Worst Possible First Impression

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter may have taken longer than readers expected. The reason for this is that I never actually intended to write it, in the beginning, but shortly after I started posting the fic, I got a good idea for a Donna chapter and I realized that I couldn’t leave her out. Also, it adds a little more to the Alternian Revolution that’s been brewing in earlier chapters. Warnings for more Helmsman-related flavor and some canon-typical violence. Thanks for being patient; the concluding chapter will be up as soon as it’s finished.

Donna screamed when they locked her in the box. She kicked out and yelled and stomped her feet in indignation. She could hear the Doctor yelling back at her through the walls. He said her name once, twice, and then it was silent. They must have dragged him away somewhere else. They had mentioned a trial? Donna screamed again at him. How dare he let them lock her in this alien box, like some kind of prisoner?

Her voice grew hoarse, so she stopped yelling. She had to save her volume for when they let her out again. The box was pitch dark, and as big as her dining room back home. She stepped off the length of each side to make sure. Donna beat her fist against the walls. They were cold and slick with condensation, and they let no light through at all.

The box was silent, but for the sound of Donna’s panting. She sat down on the floor to catch her breath in the exact middle of the box, as near as she could figure. She sat there for what might have been hours, but it felt like days, or maybe just minutes, there in the quiet and the dark.

Donna was alone in the box, until, quite suddenly, she wasn’t. She couldn’t see the stranger, let alone her hand held in front of her face, but she could hear them step inside. They stood there for a second, just breathing. How did someone get into the box with her without letting any light in? Was the outside dark, too?

Donna felt something like fear running through the bottom of her stomach. What if there wasn’t actually anyone else in the box? What if the sound of breathing was a hallucination, and she had finally cracked?

“Uh, hello?” said a voice in the box. It was a boy’s voice, and it had an American accent.

Donna heard herself gasp, and she clenched her hands into fists.

“Yeah, I’m looking for, uh, Donna Noble?” said the boy. “God, this is stupid,” he said, under his breath. “Do I have the right box?”

“Uh, yeah, I’m Donna Noble, and who the bloody hell are you?” said Donna.

“Dave Strider.”

What a dumb name for a hallucination. And why did it have an American accent, anyway? Donna stood up and tried to pinpoint where she had heard the footsteps before. She started swinging her fists through the air. If it really was a hallucination, then she wouldn’t hit anything, would she?

Her fist hit something that was not the wall of the box. It felt like skin and hard bone, with a bit of hair? Was it someone’s head? There was the sound of sneakers slipping on the floor of the box, and then a crumple-thunk, with a hollow ring at the end.

“Oh my god, you’re real,” Donna said. Dave didn’t answer. She crouched down and put her hands out and scooted forward, trying to find him. Her hands touched a pair of jeans, so she moved up to find his head.

“Oh my god,” Donna said, again. He was wearing glasses, which had been knocked into a weird angle. There was a knot forming on the back of his head.

Dave groaned. A hand came up to push Donna away. “Uhhwhat? Did you punch me? Donna?”

“I swear I didn’t mean to,” Donna said.

“Doc said you were nice,” said Dave. “Please don’t deck me again, this face was a gift from God.”

“Did you say Doctor? Where is that clown? He needs to come get me out!” Donna felt herself transitioning into a full bellow.

“Ow, he’s busy. He asked me to get you out instead. I’m cooler anyway, urgh.” Dave sounded like he was in pain. “I so cool that I literally can’t tell which way is up right now.”

Donna almost laughed. “Can you feel the floor?”

“Yeah.”

“Up is the opposite direction.”

There was a pause, and the sound of shuffling on the floor. “Right you are,” Dave said. “Give me a hand?”

They fumbled in the dark until Donna grabbed his hand in hers. His palms were rough with callouses. She pulled him up. He was solid, and he might have been the same height as she was. He did not let go of her hand.

“Okay,” Dave said. “I’m going to get us out of here. Hold on tight.” Donna thought she felt him swaying on his feet, then he pulled on her arm with a sharp yank. Donna stumbled with him and found herself immediately blinded by the dazzling light of somewhere else.

It was an overcast day in some kind of market square. Donna found herself surrounded by people on all sides, blinking in the light that trickled through the clouds. She was still holding onto Dave’s hand.

Donna turned back and took her first proper look at him. Dave Strider was a skinny teenager, in black jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, with hair the color of snow. The glasses she had felt earlier were tinted sunglasses that covered half his face, but not the bruise forming at the corner of his mouth. He glanced at her, expressionless, and then examined their surroundings.

Every person in the crowd around them was facing the same direction. At one end of the square, a rough, wooden stage had been set up. There were several people on the stage, and someone was going on and on about “persistent injuries to the people of this good country,” as he paced back and forth in front of the crowd. There were three guillotines set up behind him.

“Uh, this isn’t right,” Dave mumbled, voice low enough that only Donna heard. “This can’t be it.” He jerked forward again, and Donna was pulled along after him.

It was quiet when they stepped out into somewhere new. The only thing Donna could hear was the wind. Her footing shifted on crunchy gravel. All around her and Dave there was black oil, pouring sluggishly from metallic pipes that would have composed the world’s largest pipe organ if they weren’t scattered and embedded in rock. The scene around them was illuminated with the faint glow of cyan mushrooms and the fitful flickering of flocks of fireflies.

At Donna’s shoulder, Dave sighed through his nose and frowned. “Still wrong,” he muttered. “The lizards can’t help us.” There was no color on his face in the ambient glow. “I’m gonna do one more,” Dave said to Donna. “Here’s hoping neither of us pukes.”

Donna started to say “Wha-,” before she was pulled through space once more.

They landed on a steel floor in a room with white walls. Dave swayed in front of her, but Donna kept her grip on his hand. He pressed his free hand to his forehead.

“No, don’t you fall over!” Donna said, only slightly hysterical. “Tell me what’s going on! Where are we?”

“Uh.” Dave turned his head to look around. Donna looked with him. Most of the space on the white walls was covered in metal racks of different sizes and shapes. Each of the racks held guns and ammunition, enough to outfit a small army.

“I don’t think this is right, either,” said Donna.

“No, this is good,” said Dave. “This is the _Blue Lady_. We just have to find the Captain. I don’t know when exactly we are, but he or she should help us.”

“You don’t know when we are? Are you insane?”

Dave let go of Donna’s hand. He turned on the spot to face her and swayed once more. “Did you think Doc was the only time traveler out there?” he said with a smirk.

Donna nearly slapped him. “What kind of time traveler are you that you don’t know what time we’re in?”

“I’m having an off day, okay? This British lady totally cleaned my clock earlier, and now I can’t see the numbers on it, much less whether it’s AM or PM, so we’re flying blind until I can synch my phone somewh—agh!”

A sudden green light flashbulbed out of Donna’s field of vision. It was good luck that Dave was wearing shades, because he would have been facing it head on. Donna blinked at Dave and then spun in the direction of the flash, just fast enough to catch it full-force when it came back. The green light left a neon-bright impression on Donna’s retinas. She hissed and tried to blink it away.

“Good boy, Bec!” said a girl’s voice. “You found the visitors!”

Donna heard Dave fall to the floor. “Harley--!” he yelped with a strangled voice.

The bright spots in Donna’s eyes shimmered until she could half see through them. There was a girl in the room who had not been there before. She had lots of black, curly hair and coke bottle glasses, and she was wearing a loose black dress. There was a dog with her, or, was that really a dog? It was white and dog-shaped, but something about it looked wrong. Its fur didn’t cast shadows correctly, so it looked like it had no depth, like someone had cut out a dog shape in white paper and taped it up in space.

The dog walked over to Dave and sniffed his sneakers, and some of the strange wrongness of it was softened. It moved like a dog, and it bent down and sniffed like a dog. Donna wondered if it had a cold dog nose, and when it barked, what kind of sound did it make?

“Hey, Jade,” said Dave, wearily, from the floor. “Can you help me up?” The girl went over and pushed her dog aside. She hoisted Dave back up with one hand and held him up until he got his feet under him. “Thanks. Jade Harley, this is Donna Noble. She’s one of the Doctor’s. Was running a rescue mission that got a little out of hand. Like somebody greased that poor hand. Just flew right out of there, no getting it back.”

“Oh my God, Dave,” said Jade. “It’s okay, I’m not gonna kick her off the ship! I love meeting new people and so does Bec.” Jade smiled brightly at Donna and held out her hand. Donna shook it until something bumped insistently on the back of her knee.

Donna turned gingerly and saw the dog, which bumped her again with the spot of white fur between its pointy ears. “He wants pets, the greedy bastard,” said Jade. She ordered the dog in a high-pitched puppy voice, “You be nice to the new lady, Bec.”

Donna put her hand on the dog’s head and felt soft fur. She rubbed his head in a tentative pet, but something about the sharp boundary between fur and reality didn’t line up exactly with what her hand was feeling. She scratched him behind one ear and then took her hands back, unsettled.

“What breed is he?” Donna said.

“He’s Satan,” said Dave.

At the same time, Jade said, “He’s a dog!”

There was a long beat of silence. Bec’s tail swished through the air without making a sound.

“Anyway,” said Dave. His voice was tight. “My head really hurts right now—can we do something about that?”

“Sure thing!” said Jade, she reached out and looped one arm through Dave’s, then brought her wrist up to examine the piece of technology that was strapped on. It was like a bulky wristwatch made of industrial steel, with an LED screen and several brightly-colored buttons. Jade hit them in quick sequence and then she and Dave were gone in a flash, quite literally. The same electric green light ripped through space in front of Donna, and she shut her eyes with a hiss.

Donna gingerly opened one eye and saw that she was alone with Bec in the room. Bec turned his head at her, and she tried to find where his eyes were, but they were either hidden behind his white fur or completely nonexistent. 

Jade flashed back into the room, and this time, Donna was smart enough to look away and shade her eyes. “C’mon, Donna. Let’s get back to the medbay,” she said. Jade offered Donna her arm, so Donna linked her own arm around it, and then Jade went back to hitting the buttons on her little machine. Up close, Donna saw that she was wearing bits of colored string around her fingers.

Jade Harley’s device teleported them somewhere else. It was a different experience than traveling with Dave. When Dave had pulled Donna between different places and times, it had been a smooth and sliding feeling, but Jade’s machine was like a kick to the seat of the pants or a forceful shove. It made a noise, too, a double beep and a clicking hiss at once, and then they were in a different room.

Jade’s medbay was very brightly lit, with crowded shelves on each wall and three hospital beds. Dave was sitting on one of the hospital beds with his head tipped forward and his knuckles kneading his forehead.

“Okay, Dave, glasses off,” said Jade, while she adjusted her own spectacles. Donna saw a white shape out of the corner of her eye and turned to see Bec enter the room, perfectly silent and collected.

Dave grumbled and mumbled an indistinct refusal.

“No buts! You gotta,” said Jade. She reached toward his face, but he blocked her with one arm, then he reached up and took off his sunglasses himself. His face was pale and slightly delicate underneath, and his white-blond eyebrows were nearly invisible. He held the shades in his hand for a second, then made a motion as if to drop them, and they disappeared entirely.

Dave opened his eyes, and Donna found herself staring. His eyes were red, not the bloodshot pink of an albino person, but actually red, like magma bubbling up from a volcano. Donna reexamined her earlier assumption that Dave was human. Was he some kind of alien instead?

Jade didn’t seem to care about the color. She examined his pupils and the back of his head with a hushed exclamation. She took out a handheld device in a plastic case and waved it over Dave’s head. The device looked like it belonged on Star Trek, only it was covered in colorful squid stickers.

“Oh my gosh, you are super concussed,” said Jade, when her diagnosis was complete. Dave groaned. Donna almost snorted, but Jade was rummaging around in the cabinets and shelves. She found a white patch and a box that rattled, and put them both down on Dave’s bed. “Okay,” she said. “You put that one on your neck, and dissolve one of those strips on your tongue and you should be good.” Dave was already unpeeling the backing from the patch and sticking it onto the side of his neck. It reminded Donna of the nicotine patches people would wear to quit smoking. “If you’re still dizzy or light-sensitive in two hours then we can do another strip.”

“You’re going to cure his concussion in two hours?” said Donna.

“Modern medicine,” said Dave, as he made a cheers motion with the box of tongue strips. “Truly a miracle. Anyway, Jade, can we use your comms to call the Doctor? He should know where to pick Donna up, and a homing signal makes it easier for him to land precisely.”

“Of course! But we can walk back to communications this time. My transportalizer needs the cooldown time.”

Donna asked, “Your transportalizer, who made it?”

“I did,” said Jade. “I got the idea from Dave and his thing, but he was no help at all for the execution—it took me ages to get the coordinate system correct.”

“That’s really impressive,” said Donna. She meant it. Jade didn’t look older than fifteen, and she had already created a device that belonged in a comic book.

“I get a lot of ideas from Dave, actually, and from the Doctor, too, sometimes! After I saw how his TARDIS is bigger on the inside, I started working on my wardrobifier to increase storage space on the ship. I’ve almost got the kinks worked out. And I’ve got some preliminary plans to start work on a sylladex like Dave’s. Then all our friends can have one!” Jade clapped her hands with glee.

“Sylladex?”

“Yeah,” said Dave. He held out his hand and plucked his dark glasses out of nowhere. “Where I keep stuff that stays on me. Bro gave it to me when I was a kid, but I don’t know where it came from. I suspect time shenanigans on that one.”

“What kind of time shenanigans?” said Donna.

“Oh, a stable loop or something like that. I do ‘em all the time, but I know Doc doesn’t like loops, so you probably don’t do any with him.”

“Looping.”

“Yeah, like, if you go back in time to something that you already remember happening and then you witness it again and it happens the same way, that’s a stable loop. It gets bad when you deviate, though, and then you have an unstable loop. People usually die in those, so Doc likes to avoid them by not looping at all.”

“And you?”

“It’s true that unstable loops suck pretty hard. But the other kind are just too damn convenient. And a lot of the time I end up closing a loop on accident.” Dave shrugged. “I mean, what are you gonna do?”

“Just stick to space, like I do! Forget time—it’s too complicated,” said Jade as she led them into the hall.

“But then I couldn’t have rescued Donna or met up with Doc. And without time stuff I couldn’t hang out with you, either.”

“Aw, that’s sweet, Dave.”

Dave flushed slightly and got tight around the mouth. “What, no it’s not. I’m not sweet.”

“You are!” Jade continued teasing him while they walked through the ship. Donna didn’t see a single soul besides their small group of space travelers. The long corridor that led to the communications was full of hunting trophies and stuffed animal corpses from different planets. At the very end of the hallway was a statue of a man, all dressed in safari gear and holding an old blunderbuss. Donna thought that it was strange that they had dressed a statue in real clothes when they could have just carved some onto him when she realized that it wasn’t a statue at all. Like all the alien creatures in the room, the man was stuffed and taxidermied, then left on a short plinth in a jolly pose. Donna averted her eyes, but Jade and Dave waved.

They had to shove the door a bit to get it to open against the old man’s pedestal. Dave, Jade, and Donna squeezed inside a room full of blinking lights. Jade nodded in satisfaction and passed a pair of headphones to Dave. Dave eyed them appreciatively and slipped them on.

“Okay, what’s the frequency?” said Jade.

Dave told her, and they composed a short message to get the Doctor on Jade’s ship. Jade looked excited to work the communications, but Dave retained his façade of nonchalance. Donna just hoped that the Doctor would be there soon. It would be just like him to take too long.

\---

Donna was not very interested in what the Doctor had to say until he mentioned a despotic ruler. She interrupted him in the middle of his lengthy lecture. “Did you say tyrannical overlord?”

“Donna, have you been listening to anything I’ve been saying?”

“Not really, no.”

The Doctor looked caught off guard. Donna thought that that was good. Someone needed to keep him on his toes.

“The short version, then: the trolls of Alternia are ruled by a dictatorial Empress who won’t die, so a Rebellion came along to depose her and install a much nicer Heiress to the throne. We’re going to go help.”

“Well why didn’t you just say that?”

The Doctor blinked at her with a look that was both fond and annoyed. “I was trying to give you some context.”

“Sounded boring.”

“Fine then.” The Doctor arrested their flight through time and set them down hard. The sound of yelling filtered through the TARDIS’s door, but the actual content of the yelling did not.

The Doctor opened the door. “AND ANOTHER THING--,” said the person on the other side. It was an alien, dark-skinned and shorter than Donna, with eyes the color of fire and a nasty expression on his face. He paused his raspy tirade when he noticed the Doctor and Donna. “Well?! Are you going to keep standing there and blocking my hallway, or are you going to get in here and be useful?” he tipped his head back to glare at the ceiling and folded his arms. Donna noted that he had a pair of sickles shoved into his belt.

“Good day to you, too, Unsigned,” said the Doctor. To Donna, he said, “Don’t worry, he’s just like that. He’s under a lot of stress.” Donna and the Doctor went into the doorway behind Unsigned.

The room beyond was like a War Room from the movies, but the big map in the center was a three-dimensional hologram. The walls were bare metal with nothing on them, and all the lights pointed in toward the display in the middle. There were two ladies sitting inside, one human, and one Alternian. They were enjoying a pot of tea over a little side table. The Alternian woman looked a bit like the Unsigned, only her black hair was long enough to brush the floor, and she had a pair of fishy aquatic fins in place of ears. The human woman was blonde, wearing a prim black skirt and a lavender scarf. She swirled her china daintily.

“You’re right on time, Doctor,” said the human lady.

“Rose Lalonde! Fancy meeting you in the Unsigned’s inner sanctum,” said the Doctor. He turned to the troll woman. “And you must be the Heiress.”

The Heiress rose to greet the Doctor and kissed him on both cheeks. “I’ve heard so much about you, Doctor. Thank you for coming in our hour of need,” she said, diplomatically.

The Doctor stepped aside. “And I’ve brought help, too. This is Donna Noble.”

“Donna Noble of Earth,” said the Heiress. “I am honored to accept your aid.” She repeated the cheek-kissing maneuver.

The Heiress’s lips were cold and clammy, like a fish’s. Donna felt out of place. “Ah, well, you know,” she said.

“Would you like tea, Donna?” said the blonde woman. She was already pouring another cup. She passed it to Donna without getting up from her seat.

“Yeah, did he say your name was Rose?”

“Rose Lalonde, please. It’s sometimes confusing, but I’m not the only Rose who’s involved in these things.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah,” said the Doctor, from where he was examining the hologram map. “She’s Dave Strider’s Rose, it helps to keep it straight.” Rose Lalonde hummed in agreement.

“You’re with Dave? Are you his mother?” Donna said. Rose Lalonde looked a little too young to be Dave’s mom, but she did have a certain timeless grace to her.

Rose Lalonde’s eyebrows jumped up to an unflattering height. The Heiress snorted into one hand to cover a giggle.

“His LUSUS?!” yelled Unsigned from across the room. Donna did not know what that word meant.

Rose Lalonde worked her way through swallowing her tea. “You’re talking about my twin brother,” she said. “We are the same age. We have the same mother.”

“But he’s just a teenager?”

“I hate to break this to you Donna, but people get older as time passes. And when time travel is involved, the time passing becomes less relevant. Dave and I are the same age. He’s an adult right now, even if he hasn’t matured past middle school.”

The Doctor was having a coughing fit into his fist, the bastard. He turned to the Unsigned and asked, “Can we, ah, get a summary of the battle so far?” with a voice that was airier than usual.

“Sure, if everyone would LISTEN TO ME,” said the Unsigned. He waved a hand impotently over the hologram, then clenched a fist to thump it on the table that was projecting. The hologram jumped in midair.

“Go right ahead, General,” said the Heiress. She produced a long, double-headed trident with a graceful gesture and settled it on the floor in a pose that looked attentive and also carefully arranged. Rose Lalonde stood and clasped her hands behind her back loosely.

Unsigned cleared his throat drily as they closed their circle around the central table. The shapes in the hologram, which must have been the spaceships outside, all flashed in several colors. Most of them were bright fuchsia, surrounded on several sides by ships shown in blue and purple. In the middle of the battle diagram, a gray ship had drawn up side to side with the largest of the pink ships.

“So, we entered the battle on a z-axis crab-claw maneuver,” started the Unsigned. The ships in purple and blue vanished and reentered the hologram field from above and below. “It was touch and go for about three hours, all naval combat. Brainweb’s fighters took most of the losses.” Transparent explosions removed several of the blue ships. “Primary target was the Battleship Condescension,” said Unsigned as he indicated the big pink ship, “which we immobilized with a lucky shot to its engine blocks.” He rubbed a hand along one temple, and his red eyes were eclipsed for a minute while he sighed tiredly. “So now the Empress is trapped while Brainweb and Wavesign mop up the rest of the small fry from her fleet.”

“I thought for sure there would be subjugglator ships in there somewhere,” said the Doctor. “Why weren’t they hanging around to protect the Empress?”

Rose Lalonde smiled coyly. “We had a man—sorry a troll on the inside. It was a clever combination of sabotage and manipulation that got the entire Indigo Fleet half a galaxy away in the Tau-4-X system.” The Doctor whistled appreciatively. 

“Oh, don’t act like it was all you, Lalonde,” said the Unsigned. “She acts like she’s indispensable just because she consulted on a couple of our campaigns. It was Mirthful that did all the legwork.”

“Haha, yeah! That guy’s got legs for days,” giggled the Heiress. She stuck one wrist between the prongs of her trident and leaned forward on it.

“ANYWAY,” snapped Unsigned. “Twenty minutes ago, we finally forced docking with the Empress’s Battleship. Then we shifted to an infantry conflict in the corridors; our foot soldiers boarded in order to occupy Imperial forces while Darkhelm engaged the enemy Helmsman. Our intel indicates that the Empress is still on board. We need to lock down the ship and get ahold of her before she manages to slither out of here.”

“Speaking of Darkhelm,” said the Doctor, “will he be able to get through the enemy’s defenses? Last time I was here he was working in some suboptimal conditions.”

“I won’t pretend that the conditions are much better this time,” said Unsigned. “In fact, they’re probably worse. This battle has taken a lot out of him. Madrigal and Deadhorn are down in the Helm with him to make sure that he doesn’t bleed out from the nose. How much longer can he stay in the fight, Lalonde?”

“He has roughly ninety minutes before the ladies will need to remove him from the rig, unless you want to risk permanent damage.”

“So, we have an hour and a half to lay hands on the Empress. Which is why I’m sending in a handpicked squad to drag her out.”

“The squad will have the element of surprise,” said Rose Lalonde. “The Empress hasn’t encountered many humans before, so my brother and his friends are accompanying Sunsight into the enemy Battleship.”

“How many is that?” said the Doctor.

“Four,” said Rose Lalonde. “Dave, John, Jade, and Sunsight.”

“We want in, too,” said Donna. Four was too few for such an important mission. The Doctor swung around to look at her. 

Rose Lalonde smiled quietly to herself. “You will find them on the fourth level,” she said. “Docking bay seven.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” said the Unsigned. “Lalonde, shut your trap, that wasn’t the plan. You can’t just let them—”

“Oh, hold on, Buster,” said Donna. “I don’t need your permission to do this, and you aren’t _letting_ me do anything. I’m helping out with this whether you want me or not.”

“Fuck!” said Unsigned. “I have had it up to here with shitty broads and their goddamned delusions of grandeur.” He put a hand up to measure the crown of his very short horns, which ended up being a height roughly equal with Donna’s nose. “The Empress isn’t just some pushover, idiot. She’s literally the strongest troll out of billions, chosen from the moment she hatched to be the biggest, badassest, most singularly terrifying motherfucker in existence. You don’t want to go after her in that ship, trust me on this.”

“Oh, I think I do,” said Donna.

Unsigned snarled in wordless frustration. The Heiress came up next to him and patted him on the back. He shook her off indignantly and growled like a tone-deaf chainsaw.

“Fuck humans,” he said. “Fine, do whatever, I don’t care.” Rose Lalonde gave them a significant look. 

The Heiress looked ready to slap him on the back again, but she refrained. She looked up to Donna and the Doctor and mouthed, “He really does care.” Rose Lalonde smiled.

“Be safe,” Rose said to them, and they left the War Room behind.

The Doctor guided them to docking bay seven, as though he had been on the ship before, or maybe he could just read the Alternian signs better than Donna could. The TARDIS translated the signs into English, but it sometimes seemed like the signs were backwards, or words were in the wrong order in Alternian.

Docking bay seven was not big, just a short, rotund hallway with thick airlock doors on either end and a series of red and gray spacewalk suits hung up on the walls. The suits’ helmets were elongated vertically, presumably to accommodate the wide variety of horns that trolls could have.

Only one of the people in the docking bay had horns, though. She was another Alternian, with shoulder length hair and her straight horns looked sharp enough to punch through metal. She was wearing a teal jacket and skirt with a bright red sash tied around her waist, its ends fluttering free. There was a white and red cane slung through the sash that bounced against her leg when she moved. The woman turned to face Donna and the Doctor, and Donna could not see her eyes for the shiny, red glasses she was wearing.

“There you are, Doctor!” said the troll woman in a nasally voice. “And this must be the mysterious human woman named Donna.” The rest of the people in the bay looked up. There was Dave Strider, who was, as Rose Lalonde had said, an adult. He was wearing track pants and a white shirt with a logo that looked like it had been digitally deep-fried. He had a sword resting casually on one shoulder. Jade Harley and her dog were with him. Her hair was as wild as ever, but she had shot up from her adolescent height, and traded her old glasses for a pair of goggles that looked disturbingly high-tech.

A third human peeked out from between them. He was the same height as Jade and he looked the same age, too, with thick muscular arms and skinny legs. He had made the regrettable choice to wear cargo shorts and an old Ghostbusters t-shirt. He smiled at Donna and the Doctor with a mouthful of oversized teeth, then hefted a hardware-store sledgehammer up off of the floor.

“Oh hi!” said the guy. Donna decided that he was definitely a nerd, even if his arms did have a pleasant amount of muscle to them. He bounded forward and shook the Doctor’s hand. He got Donna’s next. He had a very firm grip. “I’m John Egbert, and gosh, it’s so nice to meet you. I’ve been friends with Dave for years, and you know, he never does shut up about you.”

“I’ve heard a few things about you, too,” said the Doctor. “John. I can’t believe we haven’t crossed paths earlier.”

“Doc’s hard to get ahold of,” said Dave, who had come up and thrown an arm around John’s shoulders. “But I know he wouldn’t miss this. It’s in all those history books, right Doc? ‘A whole spectrum of dissidents,’ or whatever you said.”

“The history books are a lot more formal, but that is the idea, yes. Such an important event in the timeline, I thought I had to see it.”

The troll woman slipped her cane free and smacked its tapered end down on the floor. “I don’t know much about time!” she said.

There was a pause. “But…?” said Donna.

Dave and John snickered at her, and the troll woman broke into an intimidating grin. “I don’t know much about time, but I do know that we won’t make it into those history books if we keep standing around here for introductions. Now that the rest of the party has joined us, let’s get this show on the road!”

They assembled into a wiggly semicircle around the airlock at the end of the corridor. Dave stood next to the Doctor and twirled his sword with the same ease that one would twirl a ballpoint pen. The airlock doors hissed open onto another rounded corridor with bad lighting. It must have been the other ship. The air that exchanged through the breach tasted more metallic, with notes of salt and squid ink that Donna found unpalatable. The walls were papered in obnoxious fuchsia, and some kind of ornate sea-themed decoration broke up the spaceship monotony every ten yards down the hall.

The troll woman’s eyebrows pitched into a vicious smile. “Follow me, everyone,” she said, and she struck out into the dank corridors. She held her cane out in front of her, occasionally gliding it from side to side. She wasn’t using it for balance or support, like the old men down at the pub did, so what was she doing? It took Donna a moment to realize that it was sort of like how blind people used their canes.

“Hey, um, Dave,” said Donna, under her breath.

“’Sup?”

“Uh, is she…” Donna tilted her head to indicate the troll, “Is she blind?”

“Sunsight? Yeah, Donna, she’s super blind,” said Dave. His voice had no emotion to it at all. “She looked at the sun, and it burned the eyeballs right out of her face. That’s why they call her Sunsight.”

“And she’s leading us?”

“Yeah, she knows what she’s doing.”

Donna had no answer to that. Her mouth dropped open, and she snapped it back shut again. If Dave was joking with her, then he was very committed. Not even the hint of a smile crossed his face. They kept walking along the path that Sunsight laid out for them.

The first troll that they met in the hallway was wearing a long, elaborate military coat that swished past his knees. He had fins on his face like the Heiress did, and horns like jagged lightning bolts. He jumped to look at them and swung the barrel of a long rifle around. Jade mirrored his pose with a huge gun that dropped from nowhere, ready into her arms.

“Wavesign!” barked Sunsight. The new troll looked at her in recognition and hastily tilted his gun up towards the ceiling. “I thought I could smell hair dye and desperation! You’re not supposed to be here.”

Wavesign hissed at her. “Can it, you blind harpy. I know what I’m doing. I left my officers in charge of the gunboats. They have the training for cleanup duty. But you need me here if you want to catch the Empress.”

“Oh? And why is that?”

“Because,” Wavesign said, “I memorized the blueprints for this battleship before I defected. I know all the secret passages and escape hatches. And I know the doorcode for the Helm, too.”

“You did? Why didn’t you share that information earlier?”

“Because if the Empire found out what I know, they would have worked to plug the holes in their security. It’s basic espionage, Sun.”

Sunsight licked her lips. “I think you are just a selfish little wriggler. But, very well, Mister Important, you can come along with us. I’ll leave it up to you to explain it to Unsigned later.”

Wavesign came up and elbowed Sunsight out of the center of the hallway. She jabbed him with her cane, but ultimately let him take the lead. True to his word, Wavesign led them through a pair of secret passageways, up a hidden ladder and behind a very ostentatious painting in a gilded frame. 

Their destination was what looked like a submarine door set in the wall of another fuchsia hallway. The door was made of thick, dark metal, and the pelt of a big, white cat-creature was mounted to the wall beside it. Wavesign typed a numeric code into the keypad set in the door’s center, and a little light flashed once. The door swung outward when John pulled on it.

The room inside was darkened, and all Donna could see was the characters on several backlit keyboards arrayed around the walls. The noise of dripping liquid covered the sound of something else that Donna strained to hear. Her heart clenched when she recognized the faintest wheezing breaths of whatever was in the room. Then the lights flickered on.

The harsh fluorescence illuminated a thick column of flesh in the center of the room. It was a lumpy mass of writhing pink tentacles, with a gray mass sunken into it. Donna tried to look away, but her eyes were drawn back to it. It was like the whole room had been designed to accentuate the weird pillar in the center.

Donna looked more closely, then more closely still. The gray thing in the middle of the pillar, it was the body of an Alternian. She recoiled in disgust. His dark skin was bleached and loose with age. The tentacles covered him, swallowed his arms from the elbows and his legs from the very top of his thighs. They curled protectively between the points of four orange horns. As Donna watched, a tendril plunged itself through the skin of his neck to wrap under his jaw. He didn’t move as the column of pink wires slowly subsumed him.

“What is that?” Donna asked. She was ashamed to hear her voice waver treacherously.

Sunsight breathed in deeply. “This is the Helmsman of the Battleship Condescension. The legends say that he was the first troll to power a starship on his own. The prototype and the archetype. To the Alternian Empire, he is only the Helmsman. If he had another life, the Empress wiped it from the records. Whatever he was before this, we only know the rumors.”

“He was a revolutionary, once,” said the Doctor. His voice had a faraway tone, like he was reading from a book or reciting a fairytale. “He was a revolutionary, like you lot. He followed a man called the Signless, who inspired a cult that lasted for generations. The Signless was killed, and the cult was wiped out, and all the other followers died. Except for him. The Psionic. She kept him alive for millennia, in agony.” Everyone watched the Doctor talk; even Sunsight had turned her eyes to him. Still, the troll in the column did not move. “He was the most powerful psychic to come out of the caverns for hundreds of generations. He told me his hatchname, once. He had the sign of Gemini.”

Jade Harley frowned at the column in the center. Bec’s ears twitched and he stayed close to her side. “He’s just a computer now. A computer and a battery. I hate Alternian biotech.”

“In this case, at least, the Empress has little regard for life,” said Sunsight.

“We’ll want to cut the cables to his head, and the big conduits at the cervical and lumbar vertebrae,” Jade said. “After that, we just need to make it quick.”

“Make what quick?” said Donna.

There was a deep, deep sadness in the Doctor’s eyes, and understanding was slowly dawning for Donna. This was war, and these people had already marked the Psionic down as one more casualty. Even if he was nominally alive, the Empress they were fighting didn’t seem to care. She had left them with the consequences.

“Well, wait!” said John. “Can’t we try and, and rehabilitate him? Could we cut him out of the Helm without killing him?”

“We could not,” said Sunsight. “He’s been in too long; his body is half-decayed already.”

“And his mind,” Wavesign interjected. The fins at the side of his face flared forward when everyone turned to look at him, but he continued. “It’s not unheard of for a helmsman to lose consciousness permanently after just ten sweeps in the rig. Even if you got him out, there might not be anything inside.”

“Lights are on, but nobody’s home,” said Dave, softly. “We might as well turn ‘em off and lock the door behind us. Dust off the welcome mat before we bulldoze that sucker to the ground.”

“Hmm.” Sunsight’s mouth flattened, and the corners turned down sharply. She stepped forward, face to face with the troll in the Helm. He did not look back at her. “It is not just,” she said solemnly, “for the Rebellion to kill an innocent, but the Condesce leaves us with no choice. If we don’t shut down the computer, the fighting will continue, and more lives will be lost.” She paused, but did not turn her head.

One by one, each person in the room nodded their agreement. Donna could see that the Doctor was close to tears.

“He should have died a long time ago,” said the Doctor. His voice was hollow.

Sunsight sniffed. “Then the jury’s decision is unanimous. We will grant the victim one last mercy.” She drew a small sword from where it had been hidden inside her cane. Its blade was bright, narrow, and straight as a plumb line. “I ask that the Handmaid take him gently.”

_Snip, snip, snip._ Businesslike and careful, Sunsight cut away at the tendrils she could reach, leaving stumps and dark skin behind. The ends spurted a solution of watery yellow, shot through with lines of purple like an infection. Without the support to his upper body, the Helmsman slumped creakily from the waist. Sunsight whipped her blade forward, and then she slipped it between his ribs.

A musical, bell-tone alarm began to chime from a nearby computer. Sunsight withdrew her blade with little effort, and the Psionic’s body fell to the floor with a wet noise. She wiped his blood from her sword using the ends of her red sash, then she returned it to its sheath in her cane.

Wavesign broke the silence. “I wonder how long it’ll take Darkhelm to get in, now.”

A woman’s smooth voice came from the computer, and the alarm faded out. “I’m already in, asshole,” it said, without inflection.

“Darkhelm, is that you?” said Sunsight, replacing her faux levity. “There must be something different about your voice—I almost didn’t recognize it!”

“No time to import speech software. I’m busy taking over the system.”

Wavesign snickered, and the fins on his face twitched upward. “Oh, I’m sure he’s broken up about it,” he said with a grin. “Now he can finally say our names correctly.”

“Shut your whore mouth, assmunch,” said the lady’s voice mildly. Sunsight cackled. “Unsigned knows that you left your post. You’ll be getting it later.”

Wavesign hunched his shoulders and drew his fins in. Sunsight stopped laughing to address the computer. “Back to business: what’s the status of this ship? And have you found the Empress?”

The lady’s voice answered her. “The Battleship Condescension has two hours of life support before its batteries fail. Rebellion forces have been notified of the deadline. I’m cutting off the remaining Imperial soldiers using the blast doors, but I’ll leave you a path to the upper decks. Camera access is spotty, but the Condesce was last seen on deck six. I suggest you split into two groups to minimize chance of escape.”

“Oh! I call team captain!” said John as he bounced on his feet.

“I’ll lead the second team,” said Sunsight. “I call dibs on Dave.”

John pouted. Dave clapped him on the shoulder. “Sorry man, wish I could be with you, but she called dibs, fair and square.” He walked over to stand next to Sunsight.

“Then I pick Jade and Bec,” John said. “A two-for-one deal.” Jade and her dog took their places at his side.

Sunsight sniffed thoughtfully. “Donna Noble,” she said. “Your hair smells like strawberries, which is my favorite color. Also, Dave has informed me that you punch good. You’re on my team.” Donna’s eyes widened. Dave gave her a stoic thumbs up.

John _hmmmmed_ and adjusted his glasses. “I pick the Doctor. Any friend of Dave’s is a friend of mine.”

Wavesign grumbled, drowning out any protest that the Doctor had about being split up from Donna. “None of you know the first thing about tactics.”

“Oh, don’t be like that, finface! We need your ranged weaponry to balance out our team. Besides,” said Sunsight. She dropped her voice conspiratorially. “Those guys are just the distraction. We’re the main event right here.” 

Wavesign sniffed indignantly. “Fine,” he said.

The two teams split up and went in different directions to get to the upper decks. Wavesign and Sunsight jockeyed for the front position in Donna’s group. She walked behind, next to Dave. He nodded coolly at her.

They made it to deck six without seeing any other trolls. Sometimes, Donna heard banging in the distance, but nobody approached them. Doors in the hallway sometimes slid open without prompting so that they could check inside for any sign of the Empress. They looked into a deserted kitchen with gleaming silver counters and an oven that looked partially organic. They walked past a darkened office and a breakroom with half a pot of cold coffee inside.

Wavesign held his big blue rifle pointed down, but he adjusted his grip nervously. Dave and Sunsight looked unconcerned. Donna saw Dave pull out his cellphone and check messages on two separate occasions, as though they weren’t hunting through an alien battleship for an evil Empress.

They turned a corner and passed a display of an old jousting lance. The lance was extra-long and its tip was coated with mud, or perhaps it was blood that had oxidized to a dirty brown color, Donna couldn’t tell.

Dave spoke up: “Alright, look sharp, kids.”

Wavesign swallowed so hard that the motion of it made his fins twitch. Sunsight smirked and brought her cane up, ready to draw her blade at a moment’s notice. They started forward again, footsteps soft against the deep fuchsia carpet of deck six.

As before, doorways on both sides of the hall slid open soundlessly when Donna’s party approached. They looked in and saw an officer’s cabin with the lights off, only instead of a bed, there was a cocoon filled with acid-green slime. Donna made a face. Dave and the trolls were impassive.

The next doorway was darkened, but when Wavesign got close, something gleaming thrust out into the hallway. Wavesign yelled and fell back. Dave and Sunsight reacted by drawing their swords and leaping forwards.

The troll that emerged from the doorway looked like an older version of the Heiress. She was dressed in a clinging bodysuit and carrying a golden trident, which she swung hard at Sunsight. Her hair tumbled freely onto the floor like the train of a queen’s robe. Dave circled around her, feinted with his sword. The golden trident flashed at him and gave Sunsight breathing room.

Donna rushed to Wavesign and shoved him up. Her heart was pounding right underneath her jaw. Dave and Sunsight darted around the figure of the Empress, harrying her with their swords and dodging frantically out of the way of the trident, which was pointed at both ends.

The Empress blocked one of Sunsight’s swings and locked the tines of her trident around Sunsight’s thin sword. Dave jumped inside the range of the trident’s other end and tried to body check the Empress, but he bounced off ineffectively. Wavesign jammed the stock of his rifle to his shoulder and pointed the barrel at the Empress. She straightened from where she was bearing down on Sunsight and looked right at Wavesign and Donna.

Something sparked in the air between them, and then Wavesign pulled the trigger. The gun kicked and threw out a wide blast of searing light. He held the trigger down and the wave of light persisted, wide enough to cover the Empress from her feet to her horns, which scraped the ceiling with her towering height.

The gun’s light would have scorched the Empress had she not countered with a blast of her own. Twin beams of energy shot, crackling from her eyes. They met Wavesign’s shot with a sustained whine of power cut and negated. The air in the hallway was so charged with energy that Donna’s hair was starting to stand up. The force of the Empress’s attack against Wavesign’s laser pushed him back slowly, but he did not stop firing. His boots dug furrows into the carpet as he was forced backward inch by inch.

Donna ran to him and shoved her shoulder against his back as a brace. She peered around the collar of his jacket and saw a white nimbus where the beams met, painfully bright. Dave was partially obscured by the glow. He raised a foot to kick out at the Empress and hacked with his sword against her arm where she kept Sunsight pinned under her own sword.

The Empress blinked. Her beams of energy winked out and Wavesign staggered forward when the force he had been fighting disappeared. The last beam of his laser swung wildly before he released the trigger. It grazed across the Empress’s free arm and one leg and she hissed at him, furious and animalistic.

Her arm that was wielding the trident buckled and Sunsight rolled out from underneath. Her sword was miraculously unbroken. Something white was circling the Empress on three sides. It was three identical copies of Dave. He stalked like a predator and the Empress bared her teeth at him. She had a mouth like a tiger shark’s. Sunsight leapt gasping away from the Empress and two more Daves flickered into existence to close ranks around her. Each Dave trained blank black lenses on the Empress, reflecting her from every angle as he paced.

The Empress jumped forward first, jabbed her trident at a Dave and drew blood. The circle closed and the other Daves swung their swords. Donna gaped at the melee. Dave was so fast he flickered like a hummingbird’s wings. The Empress moved as fluidly as an eel, with inhuman grace as she spun her trident to block Dave’s sword. 

Dave scored a hit, a cut on the Empress’s thigh that flung alien-hued blood in an arc of droplets. She retaliated with a jab that punched him in the stomach with sharp tines even as he was jumping back. Another Dave coming in from her right got a vicious backhand strike with the blunt side of the trident. Dave started moving slower, each iteration of him panting and bleeding three spots on his white shirt.

Donna saw her opening. Dave didn’t have the right angle to get behind the Empress while she swung her trident, but Donna did. She sprinted forward and grabbed fistfuls of the Empress’s thick hair. Donna yanked back and felt the Empress’s balance barely shift. Sunsight ran in from the side, underneath a sweeping trident strike. Sunsight jabbed her sword up and pierced the Empress in the side of her chest. Blood oozed and dribbled down the bodysuit as Sunsight twisted the blade.

Dave regrouped. Two of him disappeared and the remaining three of him got in close and hammered blows against the Empress’s trident. Sunsight pulled her sword out and stabbed again while the Empress was occupied. The Empress grunted and Donna felt her trying to shake her off the thick carpet of hair. Donna bore down and climbed higher, clenched her fists around the Empress’s tall horns.

The Empress tossed her horns, trying to throw Donna off, but she persisted. Dave landed a deep hit to the Empress’s hip. Wavesign came in beside him and started bludgeoning the Empress with the thick end of his rifle. A green flash filled the hallway as the Empress dropped to one knee.

There was shouting, and the gleam of the trident when it was finally knocked free of the Empress’s hands. Sunsight ceased her methodical stabbing. Jade pulled Dave and Wavesign back and John took their place, brandishing his hammer. Donna saw the Doctor pick up the trident and examine the red blood smeared on the tines. He looked tired and horrified. Dave had reduced himself to one person, and he sat down heavily against the wall while Jade pointed a gun one-handed at the Empress’s chest. She used her other hand to summon a thick metal apparatus in two loops—shackles that she handed to John.

The Empress snarled and hissed and wriggled, but Donna kept a tight grip of her horns and she did not lunge forward. John snapped the shackles on over her hands. Donna finally unclenched her hands from the Empress’s horns and dropped back down to the floor. Her knuckles were painfully tight with a fading battle rush. She backed up from the Empress, then went over to the Doctor, who was kneeling beside Dave.

Dave was gulping air and putting pressure on the red spots on his shirt with one hand. With his other hand, he pushed his sword down into the carpet point first and raised himself to standing. Behind them, Jade and John were saying something stern. Wavesign assisted them, keeping the Empress under gunpoint. Sunsight stumbled back. Her wrists and forearms were already starting to bruise a mottled teal color, and the blade of her sword was slathered with blood that was the same shade as the fuchsia wallpaper. She swiped a finger down the flat of the blade and then stuck it in her mouth, sucking on blood and giving a wavering smile. The Doctor called her over.

“What happens now?” he asked.

“We lock her in the brig, under heavy guard,” said Sunsight. “There will be a trial, but its outcome is almost certain. The Heiress will have to do the honors, since nobody else has the right to kill the Empress. Not even Wavesign. That’s the succession, I guess.”

The Doctor grimaced. “I don’t think we want to stick around for that,” he said.

“It’ll be a few days, at least. We’ve got some things that need to be set up before then. But if you’re hesitant to leave, Unsigned might make you help even more than you already have.” Sunsight grinned an unsettling grin. The smear of pink blood on her lower lip did nothing to make her look friendly.

“Ugh.” Dave grimaced. “Go on, then, get outta here. I’ll see you some other time.” He tilted his head at the Doctor and Donna, then turned to Sunsight before they left. “Is it cool if I step out for a visit to Madrigal’s clinic? I might need stitches.”

“I think they’ve got this in hand,” said Sunsight.

Before Dave could vanish, the Doctor spoke up. “Oh, if you see Darkhelm, tell him I thought he did a very good job today. I hope he’s all right.” Dave waved him off tiredly and stepped forward in that mysterious way that made him vanish into another time and place. Sunsight gestured with her own pointy chin toward the door, and they left the Empress of the trolls in the capable hands of Sunsight, Wavesign, and their human companions.


	4. Rory and Amy: Waffle House and the Irony of Circular Time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I remember reading a Homestuck fic a while ago, but I cannot recall the title anymore. It featured Dave, and at one point in the story, he goes to a Waffle House and orders some pancakes. I remember thinking, “Wow, this author sure can write a good fic, but it is now clear to me, a person from the American South, that they have never set foot in a Waffle House before in their life.” The first part of this chapter is an attempt to rectify their mistake. Waffle House does not serve pancakes, nor do they serve French fries, they serve waffles and hash browns with the burgers and chili and ham. Waffle House is not like IHOP. Waffle House has no pretensions.

They stumbled breathless back into the TARDIS. The Doctor laughed with relief, and, after a pause, Amy and Rory joined him.

“Maybe we should clean up,” said the Doctor.

Amy used the side of her hand to brush blue slime off her jacket. “Yeah, I need a change of clothes. Be back in a jiff.” She went off down the hall to find a good place to change.

Rory slumped against the nearest railing. “Did that really just happen?” he asked the Doctor.

“Sure did, what are we going to do next? I think it’s your turn to pick.”

“My turn to pick?” said Rory, incredulously. “How about we just go get dinner? Can we do that? Just sit down somewhere and eat, I’m starving,” he gasped.

“Did you say dinner?” asked Amy. She had returned without her jacket, now dressed in a clean shirt.

“Yeah, where do you want to go?” said Rory.

“Oh, I don’t know, where were you thinking of?”

“Ugh, stop it,” said the Doctor. “I’m not doing this whole song and dance of picking a restaurant to eat at. It’s always the same when you have a couple like this.”

“Well, where do you want to go?” said Amy.

“Milliways,” said the Doctor. The he reconsidered. “No wait, not there, they do the thing with the cows and it’s in such poor taste.” He hummed about it for a minute. “I don’t know any restaurants.”

“Well, we have to go somewhere; there’s nothing in the pantry worth cooking,” said Rory.

“I have an idea,” said the Doctor, who was pulling up his messaging system on the computer. “I’ll ask Dave. I’m sure he knows a good place to eat.”

Amy gave him a look of confusion. “Who’s Dave?” she said.

“You know, Dave. Dave Strider,” the Doctor said. He looked at Amy and Rory and found no recognition. “Oh, that’s right you haven’t met Dave. Well, we can just ask him in person then, you really ought to meet him.” He went to the center of the room and started pushing buttons.

“We’re going to meet this Dave Strider person?” said Rory.

“Yes, he’s a good man to know. I run into him a lot these days, and sometimes I get somewhere, and I find that everyone there already knows him.”

“Dave Strider. Is he an alien?” said Amy.

The Doctor looked up. “No, no, he’s a human, just very well-traveled.”

“Did he travel with you?”

“Not really, no. Like I said, I just run into him a lot.”

\---

The Doctor set them down on a rooftop in the middle of a big city. “Houston, Texas,” he said, perfunctorily. Clouds hid the stars above, but streetlights covered the city in an amber glow. “Yes, this is the right address. Follow me.”

There was a door to the stairwell at one side of the rooftop. Rory and Amy crossed crackly old tarpaper and followed the Doctor down to the top floor. There was only one door. The Doctor knocked on it. There was silence on the other side. He knocked again.

“Dave, are you in? Have I got the wrong year?”

Someone on the other side threw the apartment door open wide. It was a tall, pale man, dressed in a white shirt and boxers. The top half of his face was covered with a pair of angular sunglasses, and the bottom half was completely expressionless. He stood there in the doorway, relaxed and impossibly silent.

“Oh, Bro, how are—” the Doctor said. The man in the doorway held up one finger to cut him off.

He was holding a cell phone in his hand. He lifted his arm and tilted it towards Rory, Amy, and the Doctor. The brightly-lit screen showed the time. 3:11 am.

“No,” said the man, and then he shut the door in their faces.

They stood in stunned silence for a moment.

“Okay, that’s on me,” said the Doctor, slowly. “Sorry, I should have checked the time of day. Well, we could wait until morning, or we could get back in the TARDIS and try another time.”

“Was that him? Dave Strider?” said Amy.

“No, that was Bro,” said the Doctor, still recovering. “He’s Dave’s father? Maybe? He’s Dave’s guardian; let’s go with that.”

“Oh,” said Rory.

“Oh my God, you guys pissed him off big time,” said another voice from down the hallway.

The Doctor whirled to face the other voice, and his face broke into a smile. “Dave!”

The other person down the hallway was a kid, just thirteen or fourteen. He was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt and, like Bro, he was wearing sunglasses at night.

“Sup,” said Dave. “Lemme guess, you guys are selling Girl Scout cookies?”

“Do we look like Girl Scouts to you?” said Amy.

Dave shrugged. “No, wait, don’t tell me.” He pointed to the Doctor. “Doctor,” said Dave.

“Got it in one. Good to see you, Dave.”

Dave shrugged again. “I just met you last week, and now you’ve showed up at my place twice,” he said. “Maybe pump the brakes, a little?”

“It’s been months since I’ve last seen you,” said the Doctor. “And I thought I’d introduce you to Rory and Amy. They’re new friends.”

“Well, consider us introduced,” said Dave. “You came all the way out here just for that, or was there something you needed?”

“Actually, we wanted to ask if you knew any good restaurants.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

Dave sighed. “Well, I was just about to get lunch,” he said. “You guys can come with, if you want.”

“You’re getting lunch in the middle of the night?” said Amy.

“It’s lunchtime for me,” said Dave.

Rory look at Dave in confusion for a moment. “Oh,” said Rory. “You’re a time traveler, too. That’s what he meant when he said ‘well-traveled.’”

“Don’t just say that,” said Dave. “It’s supposed to be a secret, man.” Dave did not sound concerned. He didn’t sound like he had any emotion at all. It was a strange affectation.

Dave ushered them away from the apartment door and into the elevator, which they rode all the way to the ground floor. They stepped outside to a city that was mostly asleep. The sidewalks were clear of people, and though the streets were lit, cars only came by once every couple of minutes.

Dave walked with a purpose. Rory could hear his stomach growl. As though it were contagious, Rory and Amy’s stomachs started making noise, too. It was almost a three-part harmony.

Dave looked back over his shoulder at the Doctor. “I’ve gotta say, man, I think you’re losing it.”

“Oh? Losing what, Dave?”

“Your cool. What happened to the leather jacket? Or those chucks you were wearing last time?” He looked pointedly all up and down the Doctor’s outfit. “You’re wearing a bowtie, Doc,” he said.

The Doctor almost looked offended. “Bowties are cool,” he said.

Amy snorted. Dave raised one skeptical eyebrow over the top of his sunglasses.

“Bowties are cool,” the Doctor repeated. Dave responded with a twitch of the mouth that might have been a half-smile. He took them one more block, to a small brick building that was still lit up for the night.

“Waffle House?” said Amy.

“My local Waho, my sanctuary, my refuge,” said Dave, with a hint of fondness. “C’mon let’s get in there.”

There was nobody in the Waffle House except the staff behind the counter. It smelled like waffle batter and grease inside. The air conditioning was on full blast so that some of the windows were fogged with moisture. A waitress in a black apron jerked her thumb at a booth in the corner and took their drinks down on a yellow notepad. Rory had coffee, and the Doctor warned Amy away from sweet tea.

Rory tried the coffee when it came. It was passable. “So, why Waffle House?” he said.

“Are you kidding me?” said Dave. “Waffle House is the shit. I’m not even joking. Do you know any other restaurants that stay open 24 hours every day of the year?”

“Every day?” said Amy. “What, they don’t take holidays?”

“Absolutely not. The gods decreed that Waffle House would only close for natural disasters. That means that any day of any year after this bad boy opened in 1979, I can walk right in and they give me just what I need.” He smacked the laminated menu for emphasis. “A waffle with chocolate chips on it and a double order of hash browns with cheese on top. They don’t even care if I’ve already been in on that day. I once visited this Waffle House five times in the same 24 hours.”

Rory examined his own menu with a dubious feeling. “They serve their biscuits with gravy?”

“American biscuits are different,” said the Doctor.

“I knew that, but gravy?”

“It’s sausage gravy,” said Dave.

“What does that even mean?” said Amy.

“Well, we’ll order some and you can find out,” said Dave. “I bet if we ask nicely, they’ll sub it into an All Star or something.”

The waitress did not sub their biscuits and gravy into an “All Star Special.” She made them choose between grits and hash browns, which required even more explanation.

“Can I just get one grit?” said Amy.

“That is the funniest thing I’ve heard all day,” said Dave. The tone of his voice did not indicate this. “No, it’s like oatmeal. You can’t just separate the grits out, it’s one whole thing.”

The Doctor looked eager to try them, but Rory and Amy stuck with plain hash brown potatoes. Dave ordered his hash browns “scattered, smothered, covered, capped, and chunked.” Rory tried not to stare while he rattled it off, cool as you please.

“Sounds like you’ve done this a lot,” said the Doctor.

“Oh, absolutely,” said Dave. “I am the Waffle House cryptid; it’s me. I’m here so often that if anyone ever figures out my secret, it’s going to be the people who work here, but they won’t care, because this is Waffle House, and nobody gives a shit.”

Their food came in several back and forth trips from the waitress. There was a lot of it, and it was hot, and there was a certain novelty to eating American breakfast food for dinner in the early morning. They went back to Dave’s apartment building with full stomachs, and when they got there, he insisted on taking a picture of all four of them with his camera held up with one arm straightened. He did not take a photo of the TARDIS, but Rory imagined that he heard the _click_ of a camera shutter under the _whoosh_ sound of their departure.

\---

Rory was no fan of the 1990s. Being back in that decade reminded him too much of his childhood. Not that it was a bad childhood, but nobody listened to you when you were a kid, and nobody had listened to Amy, either, and the Raggedy Doctor (who Rory now knew as just the Doctor) had come in and messed a lot of things up during this year.

Thankfully, Rory and Amy and the Doctor were nowhere near Leadworth, where a young Amy and Rory were acting out all of Rory’s childhood memories, and nowhere near England, either. They were in Houston, Texas, standing outside a video store and enjoying an autumn breeze. The last time they had been in Texas, it had been an awful, muggy summer night, and Rory was glad to discover that there were times when the climate in Texas was tolerable.

There was a skate park across the street from the video store, where teens in jeans and grungy sweatshirts did tricks and threw themselves around the inside of a concrete bowl. The noise of their cheering mixed with the noise of the cars on the road. It wasn’t quite evening rush hour yet, so the cars were relatively infrequent, but it was still a bustling city. A police car shot past them with a wind that ruffled the Doctor’s hair, siren blaring.

“Well, that was a bust,” said the Doctor, as he collapsed the telescoping antenna of the instrument that he was carrying with them. “Shall we check the next one?”

Rory sighed. Amy consulted her folding city map, where earlier they had noted the locations of every video store and electronics shop in the city’s southeastern sector. She shuffled it back and forth and tried to keep the closed portions from blowing open. Amy pointed down the street. “That way. Two blocks,” she said.

The three of them set off at her direction, in a slightly miserable caravan.

“This is going to take forever,” said Rory.

“The signal keeps getting bounced around,” said the Doctor. “I really can’t narrow it down any further, sorry.”

“Well, couldn’t we just ask someone if they’ve seen any weird electronics? Surely someone would notice if their TV was haunted.” Rory made a wavy motion with his hands that he thought adequately conveyed the idea of a television ghost.

“What makes you think we would get a clear answer? This is the beginning of the digital age—who’s to say whether some new technology is weird or not? And anyway, in a city like this you’d get at least two dozen people who see haunted toasters or think their office computer is trying to kill them. You get less bias in the sampling this way.”

“I thought this thing was dangerous!” said Amy. “And it can replicate! You said time is of the essence.”

“Yes, it is, and I carefully calculated all the possible search parameters, and we are much more likely to find it if we stick to the plan and use my shielded devices. Only an expert in Earth technology could be expected to find an Eboneerian just by looking. They’re crafty buggers.”

Just then, the Doctor threw his arms out on either side, stopping Rory and Amy in their tracks. “Dave?” said the Doctor, and Rory followed his furrowed-brow gaze to a kid who was leaned up against the brick down on the corner. It was Dave Strider, but he was dressed like all the other 90s teenagers in dumb-looking jeans and an oversized jacket. He didn’t look out of place standing next to an aluminum phone booth.

“Dave!” said the Doctor again. Dave’s head shot up as he looked at them through his sunglasses, then he hastily turned away as though he hadn’t seen them.

The Doctor bounded up to Dave like a puppy. Why did he like Dave so much? Aside from the time travel, Rory didn’t see much about him that was special.

“Dave,” said the Doctor a third time, now close enough to Dave Strider that he was impossible to ignore. Dave’s hand twitched, but his casual posture did not shift.

“Shut up, man,” Dave hissed. He didn’t seem to meet the Doctor’s eyes. “My name’s not Dave, so get that straight ASAP.”

“You’re not Dave?” The Doctor wore a look of bafflement. “You look just like him, though.”

Dave slapped his palm to his forehead, jostling his sunglasses. The aviator shades weren’t exactly in style the same way they were in his native time, but they did make him recognizable. Perhaps he wore them so that he would be easy to pick out of a crowd no matter what else he was wearing.

“No, Doc, it’s me, you just can’t call me Dave.” 

“Why not?”

In answer, Dave gestured to the inside of the phonebooth, which contained another wiry teenager, who was leaned over the receiver while he talked on the phone. He looked like a sharper version of Dave, with blond hair gelled back away from his face. It took Rory a long moment to place him. The kid looked like a far younger version of Bro Strider, with all the unfortunate pimply skin and self-consciousness of youth and all the stern countenance and pale complexion of his adult self.

“Ah, I see,” said the Doctor. Apparently, they were going ‘spoiler-free’ and hiding Dave’s identity from his future guardian. “What do I call you, then?”

Dave put a hand on his chest and re-introduced himself. “It’s Jeff Walker. Just Jeff is fine, though.” He shook hands with the Doctor with exaggerated propriety, then turned to Rory and Amy. “C’mon, everybody gets a piece of this handshake party.”

After Rory pulled himself out of the drawn-out handshake he had been forced into, Bro Strider came out of the phone booth, carrying a beat-up skateboard. He was slouching in an oversized flannel shirt, and he regarded them through those same triangular shades.

“Hey,” he said. He looked at Dave. “You know these guys?”

“Oh, yeah, these guys are friends from out of town. That’s Doc, Rory, and Amy,” Dave said. He pointed at each of them in turn.

“Dirk Strider,” said Dave’s Bro. “Call me Bro.”

“Bro. Okay,” said Amy, who looked as though her entire world had been shaken like a snow globe in the hands of a particularly hyperactive child. Bro and Dave started walking down the street in the direction that Rory, Amy, and the Doctor were going, so they walked behind.

Rory smiled to himself at the look on Amy’s face. “Let me guess,” he said, just to her. “You didn’t know that he had a name other than Bro.”

“Shut up,” she told him, softly. “I just didn’t think about it.”

“So, where are you boys headed?” said the Doctor, covering up Amy’s shame.

“RadioShack,” said Dirk.

“Picking up parts,” said Dave. “You’ve gotta see Bro’s robots—they’re the coolest things. He made one that raps, and he’s got a bot in the local fighting circuit. It’s tight as hell.”

“What a coincidence! We were headed to the RadioShack, too. Do they have a good selection there?”

Bro shrugged. “It’s alright.”

They walked to the RadioShack. It was as Rory had expected; there was a red sign over the storefront and a little jingly bell on the door. Inside was full of electronics, both complicated and simple. Some of the newest gadgets, set out in displays at the front, would have been obsolete in Rory’s time.

Dirk seemed to know what he needed. He walked with purpose toward the back of the store, and Dave went with him. The Doctor pretended to check out the electronics in the window before he ducked around a shelving unit, out of sight of the man at the front who was wearing the red polo shirt of an employee.

The Doctor took out his sensor device and smoothly slid the telescoping antenna out to its full length. He didn’t have to scan for two seconds before the device lit up like a Christmas tree. It let out the wobbly, high-pitched whistle that indicated a positive result.

In that moment, three shelves worth of liquid-crystal displays jumped onto the Doctor from behind in a miniature avalanche. The LED kits next to Rory shivered in their packaging. Tiny, sharp wires shoved like worms through their carboard outsides.

The employee from the front came around the shelves to check on them, and every piece of technology became inanimate again. He looked over the scene, where Rory and Amy were frozen in fear and the Doctor, surrounded by a pile of LCDs, was covering his head and neck defensively.

The man sighed at them. “Just pick it up, okay?”

The Doctor nodded back, tense and trying not to show it.

Dave came around the corner while the store employee left. The boxes of lights and displays quivered, but they did not resume their attack. Dave tilted his head at the Doctor in a silent question.

“D—Jeff,” said the Doctor. “I think I might need your help with something. They’ve already multiplied.”

Dave paused, slow and relaxed. He kept his muscles carefully loose, like he was ready to spring into action. “What’s multiplied, exactly?”

“The Eboneerians. They’re extraterrestrial and incorporeal, but they like to live in electronics. They feed on the magnetic fields, you see.” 

The LEDs in their boxes resumed trying to escape, but none of the devices around them had enough leverage to attack. Dave looked back, then nodded, as if to say, “Go on.”

“Any regular old antivirus keeps them out, but, well, this is the 1990s. I think the whole store is infested. We’ll need to take care of it before it spreads, or they could threaten a good portion of the world’s technology.”

“And then it’s back to the stone age,” said Rory.

“How do you take care of the infestation?” said Dave.

“I—well, you can trap them in a Faraday cage and then starve them out. That’s the best way, but we need to gather all the infected technology from this store. If we let any escape, then they can just start multiplying again, so we need to be sure. Other than that, destroying whatever devices that they’re inhabiting will also end the threat.”

Dave took on an air of contemplation. Rory had the feeling that, if he allowed himself to emote like a normal person, he would be stroking his chin in thought. “It sounds to me,” he said, “like we’re gonna need some help making sure this doesn’t spread.”

The Doctor looked sheepish. “We, ah, we didn’t plan for such an extensive infestation, either,” he said. “I only have enough material for a small cage, not a big one.”

“Bro can help with the cage. He does this stuff all the time. We might need to get creative to stop the infection at this store, though. Do you still have that fancy paper?”

The Doctor whipped out his wallet and showed Dave the plain white psychic paper inside.

“Okay, I think I have an idea,” said Dave. He held out his hand, and a modern-day cell phone dropped into it. “I just need to make a few calls.”

\---

Ten minutes later found the whole group waiting on the sidewalk outside the RadioShack. Dave had convinced Bro not to buy his parts from that particular store, with the excuse that he had seen them elsewhere for cheaper.

A minivan pulled up and stopped in front of them. It was in an obnoxious shade of sportscar red. The window rolled down and they heard a smooth voice from the driver’s seat.

“What’s up, kids? Heard you needed wheels.”

The man who was driving looked like a carbon copy of Dave Strider, only he looked about thirty years old. Everything about him was identical to the Dave standing with them on the sidewalk; he was wearing the exact same glasses, and his hair was the same style and color. His face would have sat perfectly superimposed on Dave’s own, except his jaw was more robust, and there was a faint pink scar at the corner of his mouth.

“Hey, Mr. Walker,” said Dirk.

“Hey, Dad,” said Dave.

“Dad?” Rory hissed at the Doctor. “What the hell is going on, here?” The man in the driver’s seat put the minivan in park and stepped out. He was wearing acid-washed jeans with holes blown out of both knees. Rory couldn’t tell whether they had been bought that way, or whether they had been ripped up in a fight.

“Hi Bro, Jeff. Doc, it’s good to see you again.” The guy caught the Doctor in a manly handshake, far more comfortably than Dave’s ironic handshake from earlier. He used his free hand to toss the car keys to Dirk. “Put your board in the back,” he said. “Got some parts for you, too. Make sure I got the right ones.” The edges of sharp eyebrows rose above Bro’s glasses.

Dirk left and they immediately broke into whispered conversation.

“Who the hell is this Mr. Walker? Are you actually Dave’s father?”

“Don’t be dumb, Rory. He’s Dave, he’s just pretending,” said the Doctor.

“What?” Rory said.

“He’s right. I’m Dave, but you can call me Bowie.”

“What?” Amy said.

Both Daves sighed at the same time, which created an interesting stereo effect. 

“I’m Dave, and he’s me,” said the old Dave. “We’re the same person, separated by about fifteen years. Time travel, you know. But saying ‘Dave’ all day gets confusing, and besides, we’re hiding that info from Bro, so we get code names.”

“It’s standard procedure when we have multiple Daves,” said the teenaged Dave. “He’s Bowie, and you can call me Attenborough.”

“Are you serious?” said Amy.

“Oh Amy,” the Doctor said, “if you knew him at all, you would know how useless that question is.”

Rory resolved to ignore the code names and call them Dave A and Dave B instead. He didn’t see the need for theatrics.

The Doctor went back into the store with Dave B, the older one. Rory watched them surreptitiously through the front window. Once they had captured the attention of the man behind the counter, Amy put her hands up to the window for a better view. The Doctor pulled out his psychic paper, and Rory tried to imagine what he was telling the store’s employee.

“Yes, hello again, I’m Agent Smith, and this is my partner, Agent Walker,” he would say. “We’re with the FBI, investigating reports of counterfeit Chinese technology, and we need to take your inventory in for testing.” Was the FBI the right agency for that sort of thing? Rory didn’t care, as long as it was convincing.

The employee looked only slightly surprised by whatever the Doctor was saying. They had a back and forth exchange, and the employee ended up making a phone call before he allowed Dave B and the Doctor to take the electronics out of his store. They loaded box after box into the back of the minivan, until a sweep with the Doctor’s sensor confirmed that the rest of the store was clean.

Dave A and Dave B surveyed the overstuffed trunk.

“I have to say,” said the young Dave, “that is not the coolest ride I’ve ever been in.”

“Listen,” said his older counterpart. “Sometimes, being cool is about not caring what other people think. You think Snoop Dogg gets mad when some nobody thinks he’s not gangsta? Hell no. Get in the van.”

Dave got in the van. The Doctor, Rory, Amy, and Dirk followed. Dave B got back in the driver’s seat, and buckled himself in.

“Okay,” said Dave B when they had all situated themselves. “Which way to the workshop? Dirk?”

Dirk looked up from his seat in the very back. He had taken the middle seat, between Rory and Dave A, and even though Dirk was built like a green bean, it was still too little seat for too much boy. His legs were folded close in a way that did not look comfortable.

Dirk made a questioning noise.

“It’s your call, dude,” said Dave B. “Doc and I need somewhere with lots of power and maybe a couple working phone lines? We don’t have to go to your spot, but it’d be easier if we did. Wouldn’t have to set everything up, and I always did like seeing your bots.”

“You’ve seen my bots?”

“Yeah, Bro, Jeff’s got pictures.”

Dirk stared ahead at Dave B. He was inscrutable even to Rory, who was sitting right on top of him. Dirk nodded and started giving him directions.

The workshop was close, hidden in the back corner of a lot of junk cars. Dave B pulled up to the chain link fence that separated the lot from the respectable cars parked on the outside. Dirk offered a key that worked on the fist-sized padlock holding the fence closed. The actual workshop was like a lean-to, with one wall that was shared with the cinderblock office and three sides open to the air. There were a worrying number of fire extinguishers littered around the structure.

There was a faded blue tarp covering the surface of the central workbench. Dirk whipped it off to reveal an assortment of power tools and a tangled rat’s nest of wires.

“Oof--! Excellent!” said the Doctor. He was carrying in the first of the boxes of infected technology, straining to keep the cardboard closed on whatever was trying to escape. He left the box on the floor, with a heavy piece of machinery on top to keep it secure, then he roped Rory and Amy into helping him and Dave B with the rest of their cargo. Dirk and Dave A began clearing a workspace, shoving extraneous tools and half-completed projects into other cluttered corners of the workshop.

Rory tripped on a bulky piece of machinery and went sprawling into the dirt. The box in his hands tore slightly, and a pair of loose switches started hopping away in unnerving insectile motions. Dave A caught them before they could go far.

“Watch it, man,” he said. “You’ll break Squarewave.”

“I’ll break what?”

Dave just motioned to the thing that Rory had tripped over. Upon closer inspection, he found that it wasn’t just a pile of machinery, but a boxy, boy-shaped robot. It had two round, dark, glass eyes, and it was wearing a baseball cap backwards.

Rory looked at Dave. “Did your Bro build this?” Dave nodded. “Does it work?”

“’Course it works. Bro’s a genius. Squarewave is the one that raps, but his vocabulary hasn’t been updated since Bro was in middle school. He’s super easy to beat.”

“Oh yeah?” Rory adjusted his grip on the box of switches before he went to find a safe place for it.

“We could set him on easy mode if you wanted to try.”

“No thanks,” said Rory. Things were getting exciting in the center of the workshop, and he didn’t want to miss it or leave Amy alone.

The Doctor and Dirk were working together to assemble something that looked like a cross between a tent made of space blankets and a chickenwire fence. The Doctor was doing most of the assembly, but Dirk was watching with such focused attention that he could hand the Doctor a tool to use before the Doctor even asked for it. All the while, the Doctor chatted in that way of his, which was 75% technical jargon with just enough usable detail to skirt entirely around the point. They worked until the sun started to set, and dusk crept up into the lot. Dirk switched on a set of lights, and they kept going.

Far back from the workshop’s center of industry, Dave B had produced a cooler full of sodas. Rory did not remember seeing the cooler packed into the minivan, but he wasn’t about to question it when Dave offered him a drink. Rory stopped for a moment to listen as the Daves chatted with Amy.

“So, how come he’s got this whole workshop headquarters?” she was saying.

“He rents it out from the guy who owns this place,” said Dave A. “Under the table, you know, ‘cause the money all comes from the underground robot fights.”

“Yeah, and let’s keep it on the down-low, okay?” Dave B said. “His home life’s not great right now. He needs this place.”

“Oh yeah?”

Dave A looked slightly tense. He fiddled with the pop tab of his soda. “Foster care.”

Amy’s eyes widened. She nodded an affirmative. “Is he all right? Do we need to do anything?”

“Don’t worry about it, you barely know the guy,” said the older Dave. “We’ve got it handled—we know his history. It all turns out okay.”

“Okay,” said Amy, with concern.

“Speaking of history…” said Dave A. He was turned to look at his adult self.

“Oh, right.” Dave B pulled a folded piece of paper from his pants pocket. It was aged significantly, and it looked like it had been torn out of a spiral-bound notebook. He passed the paper to young Dave.

“What is that?” said Rory.

“It’s instructions,” said old Dave.

“For closing the loop,” said Dave A. He unfolded the paper to show Rory and Amy. There was a diagram at the top, a looping squiggly line in thick red marker, annotated at points that referenced a list. It looked complicated to Rory, as complicated as the weird circle-script that appeared on the Doctor’s computers.

“Would you lot get back here?” called the Doctor. His apparatus was apparently ready. Dirk was standing with arms folded, watching the Doctor suspiciously.

“What’s up, Bro?” said the young Dave.

“It doesn’t make sense.” Everyone waited for Dirk to finish. “You should be using a setup like this to generate power, but it just discharges into the air. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Oh, no, the power that’s generated here is unusable,” said the Doctor.

“No, it’s not. Why not hook up a battery?”

“It’ll get infected.”

“The battery?”

“Yes,” said the Doctor.

“It doesn’t make sense.”

“It doesn’t have to make sense to you. It just has to work.”

Dirk’s mouth was a thin line. He stepped back, giving permission to the Doctor, but he watched the proceedings like a hawk. Rory thought that he was desperately trying to figure out what was going on. They all let him watch while they piled the boxes of electronics into the shiny tent enclosure.

Even Dave A was helping. “_Et tu_, Jeff?” said Dirk with a low voice.

“Oh, c’mon, don’t give me that,” Dave said. “I don’t know anything about this either, but I know the Doc and I know my Dad. I trust them to get it right.” Dirk sighed through his nose, and they continued.

The actual process of exorcising the Eboneerians went more smoothly than Rory expected. The cage was sealed while the heaps of boxed electronics jittered inside. Rory didn’t know whether they jostled in anticipation or fear, or whether Eboneerians could even feel fear.

The Doctor had designed his apparatus with a glass funnel shape at the top, which was itself attached to a little metal bit via one half of a set of jumper cables. He had used a special word for the little metal bit—was it a solenoid or an electrode? Rory couldn’t remember.

Everyone stepped back from the enclosure. Rory saw Dave B pick up one of the leftover fire extinguishers and hold it ready. The Doctor hit the big red button to start the process, and the machine crackled to life. All the infested electronics inside jumped at once, but they were repelled from the sides of the cage by some kind of magnetic force.

The little metal bit that Rory couldn’t name started sparking, spitting off bolts of electricity that fizzled into the air and grounded themselves on the tools and bits of metal that littered the ground.

The Doctor let the machine run for a full minute before he powered it down. It cycled back into impotency with a descending bass hum. None of the devices inside moved.

“All right,” said the Doctor. “One final check.” He opened the side of the enclosure and moved to pull out his sensor once more, but he was interrupted by a scratchy metallic voice.

A light flicked on behind Rory and the Doctor. Rory turned and saw two perfectly round eyes, now illuminated in a rough robotic face.

“Yo, dawg,” said Squarewave. The lights in his eyes flicked from white to red, in the predictable fashion of horror movie robots everywhere.

“What the hell?” said Dirk.

Dave B was the first to react when Squarewave’s synthetic voice started glitching into a new, demonic register. He ripped a tire iron off a nearby table and used it to beat Squarewave in the head. Then he shoved one end clean through Squarewave’s metal chest. With no more ceremony, the lights in Squarewave’s eyes flickered out and his voice fell silent.

“That’ll do it, Doc?” said Dave B.

The Doctor’s face was doing unnatural, startled things. He pulled out his sensor and confirmed the new lack of Eboneerians. “Uhm, yes. That will do.”

“Shit,” said Dirk, who had rushed over to Squarewave. He was levering the tire iron out of Squarewave’s chest with a look of dismay on his face.

“Sorry dude,” said Dave B.

“It’s okay,” said Bro, hollowly. “He needed an update anyway.” Dave A came around to examine the damage to Squarewave’s torso. He began to hum Taps with ironic levels of feeling.

“I—should we go?” said Amy.

“Yes, we probably should,” said the Doctor.

“But what about all the stuff?” Rory gestured to the heap of empty electronics.

Dave B swaggered over. “I’ll take care of it,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

The Doctor saluted him, then, with a level of respect that Rory had not seen him use before. They left the workshop and its lot of wrecked cars and walked the way back to the TARDIS, following Amy's map the whole way. They did not have to pass the RadioShack, and Rory was grateful for that. He would have hated to deal with the employee right now, unless they were returning all of his merchandise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My goal was to finish this fic by the end of 2019, and I did it! Hooray for me. I received a startlingly positive response for this fic. One last thanks to everyone who commented and sent kudos. If you want to get in touch with me outside of the AO3 comments section, you can visit my tumblr at the-digital-pen.tumblr.com. My ask box is open, if you want to talk about writing, or about something from this fic. I would be happy to see you there.
> 
> You may notice that this work is part of series, now. I had an idea for another story in this universe, but it doesn’t fit into the structure of this fic, so I’m keeping them separate. The new fic shouldn’t have any Doctor Who characters, but if you want to read a side story about sibling StriLondes, you might want to keep an eye out.
> 
> Finally, if you want one last laugh before you go, Incorrect Homestuck Quotes made a post about time traveling Dave that fits very neatly into this weird crossover world. You can find it here: https://the-digital-pen.tumblr.com/post/189538555418/incorrect-hs-quotes-dave-rolls-up-to-a.


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